Hello,
We recently created a gitlab account to try Gitlab within our small group of company developers.
One of the first things we did was create a project and then add a wiki page to the project.
Over last week, several developers made contributions to the “Knowledge Base” page. This week, I discovered that the page was empty.
Its still there, but it has no content. Looking at the history of the page only shows that the page was created, but never modified.
Does anyone have any idea what happened? We don’t have a premium account so we’re not going to get any support, but this isn’t a very promising capability to compel us to upgrade to a premium account.
Also, Do the wiki pages get stored somewhere accessible to us, eg like the core repo?
Thanks.
Wikis are stored in separate Git repositories, and can be edited locally. The page history also is based on the Git history.
I’ve tested it in a project, the clone locally action in the upper right corner brings up the instructions.
Hopefully there is change history inside your wiki repository and you can revert unwanted changes 
Unfortunately,the page history is missing. The only thing showing in the history is the original creation of the page. All edits that happened after that have disappeared.
Thanks. Tried to reproduce the problem - from the frontend, users can edit pages and delete them too, later creating the initial state again. I’ve played around with the functionality but it always came back to logging all activity.
I’ve created some pages in my test repository, hit edit and delete page.
recreated the same page again.
Page history shows the changes.
If I try to clone the repository locally to edit files, and git force push the history to resetting it to the original state, then I can provoke the behaviour you are seeing.
git clone https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/ci-cd-playground.wiki.git
cd ci-cd-playground.wiki
git log
git reset --hard HEAD~4
git push -f
echo "local-clone-test-page" > test-page.md
git add test-page.md
git commit -v -m "Create test page"
git push
I’m curious how the wiki has been edited - only from the UI, or with using a local clone to edit the pages? A potential conflict may have happened with server-side edits (web UI) and local edits, and a force push on changes, overriding the wiki page content. It’s speculation though, I’m not sure how I can help with next steps.
Untreated to the analysis, I’d also suggest adding a backup procedure to projects, e.g. by using the UI or API for exporting project data including the wiki.
GitLab.com SaaS backup might be a way to restore the deleted data, and involves opening a support ticket.
We only used the webui to make changes.
I asked about how the pages are stored so that we could make local backups in case this happens again. Ideally, the purpose of a source code repository would mitigate against edits “going missing”, but at least if we had other copies of the repo distributed around, we might be able to reconstruct the missing data.
For full disclosure, the actual repo (that the wiki describes/is attached to) has been modified “normally”, eg local clones, and via some online tools, eg drawio/diagrams.net, but the wiki had only ever been modified with the online ui.
We don’t have a premium account, so our support ticket options are limited, although I did try and create a support ticket. The response basically said that since we didn’t have a premium account, we were on our own.
