Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-01-08/Technology report

Links can now be used in captions for  tags. (Rob Church, bug 8489, r18813)

Specific usergroups can now be exempted from IP blocks. By default, all sysops are immune to them. They can only be blocked if their account is blocked. (Andrew Garrett, bug 3706, r18904)

A separate stylesheet for handheld devices like PDAs and cellular phones has been added to the software for the default skin, Monobook. In principle, the site should now display better on such devices. However, this may not affect devices that do not correctly implement CSS 2. (Simetrical, r18949 and r18965)

Administrators can now add custom text to the bottom of the Special:Statistics page by editing MediaWiki:Statistics-footer. (Rob Church, bug 6937, r18972)

The block log will now mention whether the block stops account creation and (for IPs) whether it is limited to anonymous users, as Special:Ipblocklist does. This will only apply to new blocks. (Rob Church, bug 6638, r18992)

Some bugs were fixed:


 * A bug causing incorrect display of special page lists in Internet Explorer and Opera was fixed. (Brion Vibber, bug 8493, r18830)
 * A bug causing an Indonesian error message to appear in place of a French one was fixed. (Tim Starling, r18846)
 * On image pages, EXIF information specifying an unknown date will now display correctly. (Ashar Voultoiz, bug 8417, r18861)
 * An empty  tag will now correctly display nothing, rather than the current character encoding.  (Ashar Voultoiz, bug 8372, r18870)

A few interface changes were made:


 * When printing out a page in the Monobook skin, external link icons are no longer overlaid on the link URL or link text. Instead, they are hidden.  (Simetrical, bug 8463, r18768)
 * When a query page has been disabled for performance reasons, the page will now display a message to that effect instead of simply showing no results. (Rob Church, r18799)
 * Irrelevant preferences, such as whether a user who can't move pages wishes to watch pages he moves, are now hidden on Special:Preferences. (Rob Church, bug 8487, r18800)
 * On wikis that have mathematical anti-bot captchas enabled, so that anonymous users may give the solution to an arithmetic problem to prove they are not a robot rather than typing the text they see in an image, the message will now correctly reflect the fact that users need to solve a mathematical problem rather than an image-recognition one. (Rob Church, bug 8484, r18803) The message for these captchas will also now warn the user that they must have HTTP cookies enabled to submit an edit.  (Rob Church, bug 8469, r18820)
 * The counter for recent changes and the watchlist can now be made to state explicitly that the count is of bytes, potentially clarifying its purpose. To enable this, MediaWiki:Rc-change-size may be edited.  (In the formatting used by MediaWiki, UTF-8, characters that can be typed on an English keyboard are generally one byte and others are two or three bytes.)  (Ashar Voultoiz, bug 8330, r18811; Brion Vibber, r18917)

Some updates were made to non-English messages, specifically:


 * Bishnupriya Manipuri (thanks to Uttam Singha)
 * Finnish (thanks to Niklas Laxström)
 * French (thanks to Bertrand Grondin and Ashar Voultoiz)
 * German (thanks to Raymond and Jimmy Collins)
 * Hebrew (thanks to Rotem Liss)
 * Indonesian (thanks to Ivan Lanin)
 * Italian (thanks to BrokenArrow)
 * Japanese (thanks to kaikkd)
 * Lingala (thanks to Denis Jacquerye and Etienne Ruedin)
 * Upper Sorbian (thanks to Dundak)

Internationalization help is always appreciated! See Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to Mediazilla.