Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-12-11/Technology report

Special:Recentchanges and Special:Recentchangeslinked now display the number of characters added to or removed from a page for each edit. This will hopefully allow simple vandalism, such as page blanking, to be more easily spotted. Third-party vandalism-fighting tools have included such counts for some time. (Leon Weber, bug 1085, r18237–8)

Redirects to sections now work, using text such as. The feature should be used cautiously, because users may be confused by being sent to the middle of a page when clicking an ordinary-looking link, and the redirect notice will be obscured by the jump. (Tim Starling, bug 218, r18220)

A new extension by Travis Derouin, Extension:ImportFreeImages, was checked into the code repository. The extension allows users to import appropriately-licensed images into their wiki from Flickr. A live test is available here. The extension has not yet been enabled on any Wikimedia Foundation wikis, but it has already been suggested that it might be useful for the Wikimedia Commons.

MediaWiki installations will no longer attempt to "break out" of HTML  elements by default. This allows them to be embedded in other Web pages without any problems. (Tim Starling, r18220)

A bug in the autoblock whitelist (see archived story) that prevented it from functioning was fixed, so it should now work. (Andrew Garrett, r18222)

A few interface changes were made:
 * Sortable tables no longer use the Unicode arrow characters ↓ ↑ ↕ for sort direction buttons, but rather use icons taken from Semantic MediaWiki.  These should be overridable by changing the JavaScript variables ,  , and   to the URL of a desired image (which may be an uploaded file). (Simetrical, r17986)
 * Diffs over multiple revisions now note the number of revisions they cover. Previously it was impossible to determine from the diff page alone whether the changes were made in a single edit or in multiple edits.  (Ilmari Karonen, bug 5485, r18194)
 * There is no longer a shortcut key to log out of the wiki. Formerly the key was "o", but logging out is relatively rare but inconvenient if done by accident, and the key is right next to "p" (the shortcut key for preview).  The change will not take effect on wikis that have customized MediaWiki:Monobook.js, such as the English Wikipedia.  Where the change does take effect, users can add   to Special:Mypage/monobook.js to restore the change, and likewise users of any wiki can add   to Special:Mypage/monobook.js to enact it. (Simetrical, bug 8203, r18248)

A number of page-specific JavaScript variables were renamed. (Tim Starling, r18220) Anyone who had been using them in a custom script will have to update it:
 * 'skinname' => 'skin'
 * 'articlepath' => 'wgArticlePath'
 * 'scriptpath' => 'wgScriptPath'
 * 'serverurl' => 'wgServer'
 * 'nscanonical' => 'wgCanonicalNamespace'
 * 'nsnumber' => 'wgNamespaceNumber'
 * 'titleprefixeddbkey' => 'wgPageName'
 * 'titletext' => 'wgTitle'
 * 'articleid' => 'wgArticleId'
 * 'currevisionid' => 'wgCurRevisionId'
 * 'isarticle' => 'wgIsArticle'
 * 'username' => 'wgUserName'
 * 'userlang' => 'wgUserLanguage'
 * 'lang' => 'wgContentLanguage'
 * 'jsmimetype' and 'stylepath' were removed.

Some updates were made to non-English messages, specifically: Internationalization help is always appreciated! See Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to Mediazilla.
 * Cantonese (thanks to Shinjiman)
 * German (thanks to Leon Weber)
 * Hebrew (thanks to Rotem Liss)
 * Italian (thanks to BrokenArrow)
 * Japanese (thanks to kaikkd)
 * Lingala (thanks to Denis Jacquerye)
 * Russian (thanks to Alexander Sigachov)
 * Portuguese (thanks to 555)
 * Slovak (thanks to Helix84)