Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-09-17/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 necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version, and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.

Fixed bugs

 * Width calculation of a &lt;gallery> tag when the widths= option is given has been improved. (r25822, bug 11321)
 * A bug involving Special:BrokenRedirects that showed redirects pointing to a target that they in fact did not point to has been fixed. (r25843, bug 7890)
 * When the source language on a &lt;source> tag is not given entirely in lowercase, this now no longer causes incorrect uppercase characters to appear in the class name of the generated content. (r25873, bug 11351)

New features

 * An API query for the members of a category can now be sorted in reverse alphabetical or reverse chronological order (previously only forward alphabetical and chronological sort orders were supported). (r25726, bug 11275)
 * The API now allows an image's metadata to be queried. (r25812, bug 11308)
 * The 'Return to' link that appears in some error messages (for instance, when a non-admin tries to edit a protected page) now no longer incorrectly links to Main Page. (r25863, bug 11342)

Configuration changes

 * Some more pages have been added to robots.txt, to instruct search engines not to visit or index them. In addition to the pages previously excluded (subpages of WP:AFD, WP:VFD, WP:MFD, and WP:PT, but not the pages themselves, and also WP:CP and its subpages), six more groups of subpages have been excluded from being visited or indexed by search engines:
 * Subpages of Requests for adminship (bug 11261)
 * Subpages of Requests for arbitration (bug 11261)
 * Subpages of Requests for comment (bug 11261)
 * Subpages of Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion (bug 10288)
 * Subpages of Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion (bug 10288)
 * Subpages of Wikipedia talk:Miscellany for deletion (bug 10288)

Other technology news

 * There is currently a bug with image thumbnailing that's affecting large numbers of images, causing them to not display in pages. The bug was caused at least partly by a server running out of disk space; system administrators are currently trying to fix the problem. As a workaround in the meantime, if you come across an image that isn't working, purging the server cache of the image's image description page often solves the problem for that image. (For more information, see this mailing list post.)

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 or use Betawiki.