Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-07-02/Technology report

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version, and changes with a version number higher than that will not yet be active.

Fixed bugs

 * The limit on signature length has been changed to 255 characters, rather than 255 bytes. (Many non-English characters take up 2 or 3 bytes of UTF-8, and therefore the limit was effectively lower for usernames containing such characters before this change.) (r23389, bug 10338)
 * Permanent links now work correctly in all cases if they refer to a page which was renamed. (Previously the links would fail if the redirect created by the move was deleted.) (r23445, bug 10377)
 * It's now impossible to accidentally revert a page to a version in a different page's history (to do this deliberately, copying-and-pasting is now required). (r23483, bug 7071)
 * The fallback used when the AJAX watch function fails to watch properly via AJAX now actually works. (r23506, bug 10397)
 * A new interface message MediaWiki:Movepage-moved has been introduced to replace MediaWiki:Pagemovedtext, due to problems with the parameters in the old message. (r23513, bug 10401)
 * Categories now page correctly in cases when several entries in the category have the same sortkey. (r23016, bug 10280)
 * The help message for api.php, when specifically requested via action=help, now displays no matter what the output format. (r23566, bug 10931)
 * The user creation log for a user (for instance, following Request an account requests) has been fixed to reflect the contributions of the created user when colouring the contributions link (r23447, bug 10360), not those of the user creating the account

New features

 * Special:ExpandTemplates now includes a preview of the text being expanded. (r23441, bug 7172)
 * An action=help&version query on api.php now returns the MediaWiki version number in addition to the information it previously returned. (r23502, bug 10392)
 * Several changes were made to the way user and sitewide .js and .css pages were rendered; discussion about these changes was still ongoing at press time (some of the requests for changes to how they were rendered were contradictory; there have been requests both for the pages to display as fully syntax-highlighted JavaScript or CSS, and for the pages to be parsed entirely as normal wikimarkup, with various intermediate suggestions also having been made). Relevant bug numbers: 10196, 10314, 10410, 10422.

Other technology news

 * The secure server, https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Main_Page, has been given a new security certificate that should be recognized automatically by browsers without an error message.
 * The search feature accessed by default using Special:Search and/or the 'Search' button in the sidebar has been upgraded. New features include understanding redirects (redirects contribute to the score of their target and do not appear in the results), scoring based partly on the linkedness of articles, searching outside the article namespace directly from the search box (to do this, type the namespace name and a colon immediately before the search term, or all: to search all namespaces), the capability to search for accented titles by typing an unaccented version or common transliteration, and the ability to search for numbers.
 * There is ongoing discussion about the location and appearance of section edit links, due to usability problems reported with the current arrangement.

Ongoing news

 * Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla.