Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-03-12/Technology report

New features
The sizes of old revisions are now displayed in page histories. (River Tarnell,, )

When visiting Special:Contributions directly, without any username provided, the user will now be given a form asking for a username (or to search for [ contributions of new accounts]) instead of being given an error message. Also, the same form will appear at the top of Special:Contributions for any user, allowing the viewer to switch to other users' contributions easily. (Sui Min and Raimond Spekking; ;, , et al.)

Special:Popularpages will now show pages from any content namespace, not just the main namespace. (Some wikis have "content" namespaces that aren't the main namespace, such as the English Wikibooks' "Cookbook" namespace.) Special:Popularpages is not enabled on the English Wikipedia. (patch by Jim R. Wilson,, )

Special:Log/block, /delete, and /protect will now have links next to each entry to unblock, undelete, or change protection level, respectively. (Raimond Spekking and Sui Min, and, )

When viewing a diff of multiple revisions (such as this), clicking "undo" will now undo all the edits covered by the diff, not just the last. (Aaron Schulz,, )

After discussion on Wikitech-l, the addition of a checkered background behind transparent parts of images on image pages (as is common in image editors to distinguish transparent from white) was reversed. Users can still add it to their own stylesheets manually. (Erik Moeller, )

Fixed bugs
Underlining in backlinks for references will now be immediately under the letter, not at the bottom of the entire line, for those with underlining enabled for links. (Raimond Spekking,, )

A coding error made in refactoring a function was fixed. The error could have led to error messages, and possibly the failure of either limitations of actions per user per unit time (e.g., a limited number of account creations per IP address per hour) or exemptions from such limitations. (Patch by Rob Church,, )

Usernames that look like IPv6 addresses are no longer allowed. MediaWiki does not yet support IPv6, but it probably will at some point in the indefinite future, at which point this will prevent conflicts. Standard IPv4 addresses have been invalid as usernames for a long time. (River Tarnell, )

Page titles (and, therefore, user names) can no longer contain three consecutive tildes. They can therefore no longer interfere with the signature/date syntax. (Brion Vibber,, )

ImageMap tags will now work correctly with multiple polygons. (Brion Vibber,, )

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


 * Arabic (thanks to Meno25)
 * Bulgarian (thanks to darina)
 * Cantonese (thanks to Shinjiman)
 * Finnish (thanks to Niklas Laxström)
 * French (thanks to Rémi Kaupp)
 * German (thanks to Raimond Spekking and Arnomane)
 * Hebrew (thanks to Rotem Liss)
 * Indonesian (thanks to Ivan Lanin)
 * Italian (thanks to BrokenArrow)
 * Kazakh (thanks to AlefZet)
 * Lithuanian (thanks to Edgaras)
 * Marathi (thanks to wces423)
 * Russian (thanks to Alexander Sigachov)

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