Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-11-05/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

 * When renaming a user, uses of their username in page history will now update more quickly. Executing the table queries all at once also avoids the problem of edits not being updated if they are deleted while renaming takes place. (r27035)
 * A bug in the sortable table code affecting numbers with at least two thousands separator commas was fixed. (r27138)
 * It's now impossible to enter a deletion, protection, user rights change, user rename, bot flag change, or promotion to sysop edit summary that's too long to fit in the database. Previously, such long summaries could be entered but the extra parameters would be ignored. Also, the default summary for deletion has been reworked to better fit into the edit summary field. (r27170)

New features

 * After logging in via the API, the parameters (lguserid, lgusername and lgtoken) that it returns can now be passed as parameters in the URL rather than in cookies (obviously, I can't give an example). (r27151)
 * It's now possible to make an API query for the currently logged-in user's preferences. (r27153)

Other technology news

 * A feature was added to the software that makes it possible to set up patrolled edits on the new page log only. (Previously, it was only possible to set up patrolled edits on Recent Changes, which includes new pages and the new page log.) The full patrol feature is used on many other wikis (including some Wikimedia wikis) to help load-balance Recent Changes, and marks edits with a ! mark to users with the correct permissions (these permissions are usually set to administrators only or to all 'autoconfirmed' users, that is, users who can edit semiprotected pages) if no such user has yet indicated that they've reviewed them; it does not affect what is shown to users generally, but only helps to make sure that each edit is reviewed exactly once. The new-page-only patrol feature does not seem to be enabled anywhere yet, but it would perform a similar feature, of making sure that each new page is reviewed exactly once by a user in the relevant group. This is relevant due to the possibility that anonymous page creation may soon be re-enabled (see archived story); no developer has yet said that they will or won't enable it, and whether it is enabled and what the details will be will likely depend on whether there's a request from the community with the required level of consensus. (r27025, bug 1405)
 * Several changes were made to the fundraiser code; one of the suggestions from Fundraising redesign was coded and set as the fundraising banner, and various bugfixes to the code were also implemented.

Ongoing news

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