Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-03-20/Technology report

As always, it may take some time for software changes to go live on the site. This week may take a particularly long time, because changes must be made to the very large revision table (well over 100,000,000 rows for the English Wikipedia alone). (The large revision-deletion change committed recently needs to be reviewed by a core developer before it can be activated, but it was rolled back temporarily so the code can go live before then.)

A contractor, Joerg Baach, was hired to work on an implementation of the "stable versions" concept, that would present only reviewed versions of pages to users who did not explicitly request the very latest (possibly unreviewed) revision.

New features
Special:Listusers is now case-insensitive with respect to the first letter, as usernames themselves are. That is, typing "bob" in the search box will return User:Bob (if that user exists), which makes sense because it is impossible to have a User:bob: the first letter of a username must always be capital. Subsequent letters are still case-sensitive, as usernames themselves are; in principle, it is not prohibited to have a User:Bob and User:BOB on the same project (although with the recent enabling of similarity checks for new users, neither could sign up anymore if the other is signed up). (Raimond Spekking, )

On Special:Log, it is now possible to search for log entries relating to pages beginning with a particular prefix rather than just being able to search for exactly one specified page. (Raimond Spekking,, )

An oversight-like feature now exists in the software for not just old page revisions, but also log events and file revisions. It will also be possible to block users so that their usernames do not appear on the user list or block list, in case they are defamatory, reveal personal information, etc. (Aaron Schulz,,  et al.)

It is now possible to retrieve entire categories of articles via Special:Export, without having to list all the articles by name. (This feature was added a short time ago, but had to be removed due to bugs in the implementation.) (Daniel Kinzler, )

When a user uploads an image under a name that's already used, a thumbnail of the existing image will now appear on the resulting warning page. (Raimond Spekking, )

"Anonymous only" has no effect on blocks of users, only of IP addresses, so if the option is enabled for a user block, it will no longer be written into the block log. (Raimond Spekking, )

It is now possible to use Special:Linksearch for URLs beginning with https://, ftp://, irc://, or news://, in addition to the standard http://. Existing links to such URLs will not be indexed until the page is edited. (Raimond Spekking,, )

Fixed bugs
Special:Log will now display correctly if there are no results. (Aaron Schulz, )

Attempting to edit a nonexistent section (perhaps due to following a bad link) will now generate an error message rather than accepting the edit but not doing anything. (Steve Sanbeg,, )

Protection can no longer "cascade" to included pages for semi-protection (or similar protection levels, should others be enabled). This will prevent users who can edit semi-protected pages from including other pages so as to protect them. (Aaron Schulz,, )

If a deleted image exists with a particular name, someone attempting to upload a new image with that name will no longer receive a warning. (Aaron Schulz,, )

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


 * Breton (thanks to Fulup)
 * Cantonese (thanks to Shinjiman)
 * Czech (thanks to Petr Čech)
 * Finnish (thanks to Niklas Laxström)
 * German (thanks to Raimond Spekking)
 * Hebrew (thanks to Rotem Liss)
 * Indonesian (thanks to Ivan Lanin)
 * Italian (thanks to BrokenArrow)
 * Occitan (thanks to Cédric)
 * Romanian (thanks to KlaudiuMihaila)
 * Slovak (thanks to helix84)

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