Wikispooks:SMW Known Issues

	This page has not been updated since a major server upgrade in January 2019. It no longer applies given the updated SMW version and a more powerful host computer. It is left as a reminder of the problems of trying to run the site on an insufficiently powerful webhost.

Semantic Mediawiki does have problems, some of which have been addressed since this article was written. Go to Special:Version to see which version of SMW site is currently (it was 2.5.8 as of February 2019).

Server Load

When you save changes to the semantic data, they may not be instantly reflected in the pages served. The reason for this is that, like Mediawiki, SMW has a queue of updates. This is unavoidable and only to be expected with such software. SMW has not been subject to the same extensive testing and optimisation as Mediawiki, and so can use a lot of resources (server RAM and CPU). This should not present a serious problem to experimentation and development, provided certain issues are borne in mind:

Changing a lot of high use templates will increase the server queue resulting in the slower processing of semantic templates. Be careful of experiments with high use templates such as Template:SMWDocs; experiment elsewhere first to check your syntax.
It is possible to place the system in a non-deterministic (i.e. random) state, by stating the equivalent of (If A, then Not A). Be careful of any templates which autogenerate a lot of markup (such as Display Properties). Try to avoid their use if possible, and think it through carefully if not.

Known Bugs

SMW bugs should be reported to the SMW developers. This is for listing bugs known to be affecting Wikispooks:

~~Column headings are omitted when querying on an inverse property - e.g. Lone_nut#Official_examples~~
~~Dates which have a year and month but no day create a red error message - e.g. File:King Family File Transcript.pdf~~

Rough Edges

This list is for points which may not merit the label 'bug', but where SMW behaviour is still sub-optimal

~~Redirects do not work perfectly when in a list - e.g. See Edward Snowden's revelations list on Whistleblower - these repeated entries (redirects) are redundant~~