Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-12-10/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 that accidentally caused an extraneous colon and space to show up on the deletion confirmation screen when a default deletion reason was given was fixed. (r28073, bug 12178)
 * It seems that the tentative fix for the UNIQ bug that was still being tested at press time last week did work (see related story). (r28004, bug 12154)
 * The history display for a page no longer says "Revision history" as a subtitle, because that information is already present in the main title. (r28137, bug 11993)
 * A fix was added that speeds up loading times by several minutes on Internet Explorer 5 on Mac OS 9. (r28192, bug 12055)
 * The paging (next 50/previous 50) links on Special:Linksearch now work in some situations where they failed before (for instance, if "mailto:" is used as the search term). (r28208, bug 12107)

New features

 * The 'Related changes' option (Special:Recentchangeslinked) now has an RSS feed; in particular, if a page is being used as a public watchlist, this provides a way to get an RSS feed for that watchlist. (r28274, bug 943)

Configuration changes

 * The Gadgets extension (mw:Extension:Gadgets) was enabled on the English Wikipedia. The extension allows administrators to add JavaScript and CSS (user scripts and user styles) as preferences on Special:Preferences, in a new 'Gadgets' section. (The procedure for administrators to add new gadgets is somewhat complicated, and explained on the extension page.) Currently, the gadgets that have been added are navigation popups, a gadget to disable access keys, and a gadget to open external links in a new tab or window. (bug 12190)

Breaking software changes

 * The messages MediaWiki:Searchsize and MediaWiki:Searchscore have been replaced with MediaWiki:Lucene-resultsize and MediaWiki:Lucene-searchscore, to allow for better control over localisation (the message is given a number formatted according to the relevant language rather than a plain number), so any customisations there need to be repeated. (r28141/r28181, bug 10869)

Other technology news

 * A change was scheduled to the software that would allow use of rollback to all users, not just administrators. There are new rate limits in the software to limit the rate at which non-administrators can use rollback, although they are currently irrelevant because non-administrators can't use rollback anyway. Following some discussion about the change (both supporting and opposing the change), this change was reverted; the limits are still present but non-admin rollback will not now be enabled without consensus on an individual wiki. A discussion about the matter here on the English Wikipedia is being held at Rollback for non-administrators. (change made in r28193, reverted in r28248)

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.