Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-08-11/Technology report

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.4 (a8dd895), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.

Fixed bugs

Administrators are no longer shown CAPTCHAs when creating accounts for other users. (r38796, bug 12142)
Shared IPs (those on the autoblock whitelist) are no longer blocked automatically by the Torblock extension. (r38853, bug 14934)
Redlinks are no longer erroneously marked with the "stub" class (used for links to short articles if a stub threshold has been set in the user's preferences). (r38980, bug 15091)
Redirects no longer allow unrelated text between the #REDIRECT and the link to the page being redirected to. (r38737, bug 15053)
Special:Export via category now works even if the Category: prefix is given at the start of the category name. (r39184, bug 14790)

New features

The .ogv extension is now permitted on uploaded files, as an alternative to .ogg (they refer to the same video format Ogg Theora, but .ogg is also commonly used for Ogg Vorbis sound files). (r35978, bug 14315)
It's now possible to query the API to find out how many titles (or values of some other multivalue parameter) are simultaneously accepted in an API query. (r38639, bug 15048)
A new requestid= API parameter can be given to any API request; it is simply repeated back to the user requesting the query in the query output, to help distinguish requests. (r38638, bug 15044)
A new interface message MediaWiki:Pagetitle-view-mainpage can be set to change the HTML <title> of the main page (regardless of whether it is at Main Page or some other location). (r38730, bug 15007)
Special:Contributions now displays the name of the user for whom contributions are being checked in the HTML <title> of the page. (r38795, bug 14921)
CSS classes ns-talk and ns-subject have been added to distinguish talk pages from non-talk pages (r39054, bug 15079); also, CSS classes have been added to show what skin is being used to show the page (r39058, bug 15052).
It is now possible for administrators to place information which will be shown on the edit page for a particular page, by modifying specially-named interface messages. (r39121, bug 15102). For example, MediaWiki:Editnotice-0 will appear when editing any page in article space, and MediaWiki:Editnotice-0-Main_Page will appear when editing the Main Page.

Configuration changes

Wikipedia:Changing username and its subpages are now excluded via robots.txt, and thus will not show up in search engines. (bug 14793)

Other technology news

A large variety of page moves were blocked accidentally for a while due to a Wikipedia administrator misconfiguring an anti-vandalism feature recently; this has now been fixed.

Ongoing news

Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See mw:Localisation statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla or use Betawiki.


Also this week: Growth study Board Nominating Committee Greenspun project WikiWorld News and notes Dispatches Features and admins Technology report Arbitration report

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