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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-01-14/Technology report

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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.8 (f08e6b3), 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

  • Some minor HTML errors in the produced HTML during an edit conflict have been fixed. (r29474, bug 12553)
  • section=0 now returns just section 0 when used with action=raw, rather than the entire page. (r29476, bug 12505)
  • The definition of a category timestamp (not normally visible to users, but available via the API and used by some scripts, and on some other projects) has changed; the category timestamp for a page now never changes when the page is renamed (previously it did only if the category was included without an explicit sortkey). (r29615, bug 12584)
  • The dropdown box for selecting a namespace on Special:Newpages now reflects the true setting of the namespace filter when the page is loaded; previously it sometimes incorrectly displayed that all namespaces were included even though the filter was set to the article namespace only. (r29618, bug 12588)
  • When a bot creates a page, that edit now again doesn't appear in Recent Changes by default. (This behaviour used to be the case, but was accidentally broken and fixed again.) (r29699, bug 12611)

New features

  • API queries for a page's protection status now also query whether the page is create-protected. (r29427, bug 12543)
  • It's now possible for a bot-flagged user to make an edit that isn't bot-flagged, by appending &bot=0 to the end of the relevant URL. (r29539, bug 12574)
  • It was also realised this week that at some point it became possible to write universal interwiki prefixes; that is, an interwiki prefix that works no matter which Wikimedia wiki the prefix is rendered on. The link should be written [[m:project:language:page name]] (e.g. m:w:en:WP:POST); this routes the parsing of the links via Meta, thus making them universally correct. (bug 4285)

Configuration changes

  • The user rights framework configuration was changed for the English Wikipedia this week, allowing administrators to cause users to become 'rollbackers' or to remove that right (see related story). A rollbacker can perform rollback in much the same way that an administrator can, except that if the rollbacker is not also a bot the rate at which rollbacks may be done is limited (to 5 per minute, or 5 per 2 minutes if rollback is for some reason granted to a non-autoconfirmed user). (bug 12534)

Other technology news

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:
  • From the editor
  • 2007 in review
  • Wikimania 2009
  • Roll 'em back, move 'em out
  • Apple leak?
  • WikiWorld
  • News and notes
  • In the news
  • Tutorial
  • Features and admins
  • Technology report
  • Arbitration report

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