ChatGPT's "Copy" button corrupts MediaWiki tables

ChatGPT Bugs
1

I spent far too long debugging what I thought was a ChatGPT hallucination, but it turns out the issue appears to be in the ChatGPT web UI.

Reproduction

  1. Ask ChatGPT to generate a MediaWiki table ({| ... |} syntax).

  2. Use the Copy button on the response.

  3. Paste the result into a text editor.

Expected

The copied text should be identical to the MediaWiki source generated by ChatGPT.

Actual

The copied text appears to be transformed into a bizarre hybrid of:

  • MediaWiki table syntax

  • Markdown table syntax

  • Broken table rows

For example, rows such as:

! colspan="2" |Model
| Example A
| Example B

become something resembling:

| ! colspan="2" | Model |
| Example A |
| Example B |
| ---------------------- | ---------- |

which is neither valid MediaWiki nor valid Markdown.

Evidence

To rule out model hallucination, I asked ChatGPT to write the exact same table to a downloadable .txt file.

The file contained the expected MediaWiki source.

The corruption only appeared when using the ChatGPT web interface’s Copy button.

Why this matters

MediaWiki tables are common on:

  • Wikipedia

  • Wikitech

  • ArchWiki

  • MediaWiki installations

  • company internal wikis

Users may spend significant time trying to debug table syntax that was never actually generated by the model.

Has anyone else run into this?

If OpenAI staff are reading: please check whether the copy pipeline is attempting to reinterpret MediaWiki tables as Markdown tables before placing them on the clipboard.