Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-10-08/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

 * Several syntax errors were corrected in Wikimedia's robots.txt file; these errors caused some search engines to ignore some of the instructions in that file (such as the instruction not to index AfD). (bug 11508; fixed with a configuration change)
 * The rvendid parameter to the API (example) now works correctly. (r26315, bug 11534)
 * Links in edit summaries no longer sometimes mistakenly continue outside the edit summary and into the rest of the page they're on. (r26409, bug 11560)
 * The 'you have new messages' bar now appears for anonymous users when and only when they have a new message (see related story). (r26357, bug 9213)

New features

 * A new interface message MediaWiki:Loginstart has been added that displays at the start of the login screen. (r26477, bug 11574)

Other technology news

 * The Wolof Wiktionary was reopened this week. It had previously been closed, but the information in closed (to be precise, locked in read-only mode) wikis is retained, allowing them to be reopened. (bug 11512)

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.