Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-01-14/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

 * Some minor HTML errors in the produced HTML during an edit conflict have been fixed. (r29474, bug 12553)
 * section=0 now returns just section 0 when used with action=raw, rather than the entire page. (r29476, bug 12505)
 * The definition of a category timestamp (not normally visible to users, but available via the API and used by some scripts, and on some other projects) has changed; the category timestamp for a page now never changes when the page is renamed (previously it did only if the category was included without an explicit sortkey). (r29615, bug 12584)
 * The dropdown box for selecting a namespace on Special:Newpages now reflects the true setting of the namespace filter when the page is loaded; previously it sometimes incorrectly displayed that all namespaces were included even though the filter was set to the article namespace only. (r29618, bug 12588)
 * When a bot creates a page, that edit now again doesn't appear in Recent Changes by default. (This behaviour used to be the case, but was accidentally broken and fixed again.) (r29699, bug 12611)

New features

 * API queries for a page's protection status now also query whether the page is create-protected. (r29427, bug 12543)
 * It's now possible for a bot-flagged user to make an edit that isn't bot-flagged, by appending &bot=0 to the end of the relevant URL. (r29539, bug 12574)
 * It was also realised this week that at some point it became possible to write universal interwiki prefixes; that is, an interwiki prefix that works no matter which Wikimedia wiki the prefix is rendered on. The link should be written m: project:language:page name (e.g. m:w:en:WP:POST); this routes the parsing of the links via Meta, thus making them universally correct. (bug 4285)

Configuration changes

 * The user rights framework configuration was changed for the English Wikipedia this week, allowing administrators to cause users to become 'rollbackers' or to remove that right (see related story). A rollbacker can perform rollback in much the same way that an administrator can, except that if the rollbacker is not also a bot the rate at which rollbacks may be done is limited (to 5 per minute, or 5 per 2 minutes if rollback is for some reason granted to a non-autoconfirmed user). (bug 12534)

Other technology news

 * A report on some of this week's site operations is available; there was a performance review of the software. This made several changes, especially to the way that caching works; also, the Title Blacklist extension (controlled via MediaWiki:Titleblacklist) was disabled pending a performance improvement, and the 'refresh' button on the browser is now similar to action=purge in fewer situations than before. There were other related miscellaneous changes such as changing MediaWiki:Pagecategories from the default  to just  ; on a wiki as large as the English Wikipedia, and for a message that needs to appear on most pages, this actually makes a significant difference.
 * Four new Wikimedia wikis have been created this week:
 * Lower Sorbian Wikipedia (bug 12181, Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Lower Sorbian 2, http://dsb.wikipedia.org)
 * Crimean Tatar Wikipedia (bug 12399, Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Crimean Tatar 2, http://crh.wikipedia.org)
 * Saterland Frisian Wikipedia (bug 12502, Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Saterland Frisian, http://stq.wikipedia.org)
 * Greek Wikiversity (bug 12587, Requests_for_new_languages/Wikiversity_Greek, http://el.wikiversity.org)
 * Wikipedia locked up for about 10 minutes on 11 January due to the rename of User:Warlordjohncarter (who has a server edit count of over 76000) to User:John Carter; the servers take some time to process a rename of that size.

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.