Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-10-01/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

 * A bug which caused the name of the rename log to sometimes fail to load on Special:Log was fixed. (r26105, bug 11446)
 * The API now returns a more useful error message when it couldn't carry out an action due to high database load. (r26140, bug 11404)
 * When a &lt;math> tag encounters an error, it now returns the correct error message rather than always returning the default error message. (r26184, bug 11474)
 * The Cortado player sometimes used by the OggHandler media handler to play audio/video (depending on what software is available on the viewer's computer) has been patched to no longer sometimes cut off the end of the sound. (r26224, bug 11232; note that you may have to bypass your cache to gain the benefit of this fix)
 * There were some problems with watchlists on 25 September; this was due to the server that handles watchlists having problems. (The database server that handles watchlist requests was down for a while; it's back up now. --brion 17:25, 25 September 2007)
 * The Search feature now only finds exact word matches, rather than matching a substring of a word, unless a * is used to specify 'any characters go here' (so to find articles containing words ending in the letters 'ing', it's now necessary to search for *ing rather than just ing). (r26271, bug 278)

New features

 * Every page now contains an RSS feed link for Special:Recentchanges. (r26058, bug 5412)
 * A new API feature with similar functionality to Special:ExpandTemplates has been added; the rvexpandtemplates=true parameter has been added to a query for a page's content, which recursively expands all templates on the page in the output. (r26125, bug 11405)
 * The RSS watchlist feed now allows an allrev=true option that works the same way as the 'Expand watchlist to show all applicable changes' preference. (r26139, bug 11218)
 * It's now possible to prevent images being uploaded with certain non-descriptive filenames by blacklisting prefixes for image filenames via MediaWiki:Filename-prefix-blacklist. (r25637, bug 10735)
 * The section= parameter was added to action=raw, so it's now possible to request the raw content of a section as well as the raw content of a page. (r26142, bug 11353)

Other technology news

 * Two new Wikimedia wikis were created this week (note that these and other links to the new wikis might not work yet, due to the interwiki map taking time to update):
 * The Bengali Wikisource (request on Meta, bugzilla entry), and
 * The Upper Sorbian Wiktionary (request on Meta, bugzilla entry)

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.