Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-01-21/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

 * Using Special:Userrights no longer creates a log entry logging no changes if no rights changes were made using the page. (r29756, bug 12614)
 * Special:Linksearch is now again capable of showing more than 50 results (the links to page through the results had previously been removed by mistake). (r29766, bug 12631)
 * Imagemaps and now no longer put interwiki links in the what-links-here of the page with the same name on the project where the imagemap or ifexist is used. (r29834, bug 12651)

New features

 * Three more JavaScript variables are now available to scripts and bots in the source of a page: wgVersion (the version of MediaWiki being used), wgEnableAPI and wgEnableWriteAPI (whether the API and write API are available). (r29757, bugs 12536 and 12622)
 * Several more variables are now available for automatic substitution in rollback summaries: (r29794, bug 12585)
 * $3: revid of the revision reverted to
 * $4: timestamp of the revision reverted to
 * $5: revid of the revision reverted from
 * $6: timestamp of the revision reverted from
 * Redirects now work in the Image: namespace, if a particular configuration option is enabled. It is currently disabled on Wikimedia projects, but may eventually be enabled when the feature is improved. (r29858 and, bug 4470)

Other technology news

 * There was another attempt to delete Sandbox at about 22:30 UTC on 16 January, causing a database lock for nearly an hour; as a result, limits were placed on the ability of administrators to delete pages with large histories. (The relevant server admin log entry is: 22:30ish brion: someone tried to delete sandbox on en.wikipedia, leading to various DB error warnings (transactions full) and breakage of most editing for nearly an hour. Have hacked in a 5000-revision limit on deletions, will prettify it shortly.) There was also a thread on the technical village pump about it. Most of the revisions in the Sandbox have now been moved elsewhere, making it again possible for administrators to delete it. If a revision needs to be deleted from a page with a large history, and it meets the Oversight policy, the correct course of action is to contact an oversight user.
 * A change to the preprocessor is scheduled for 24 January, which will cause several changes to the way that template and section edit markup works, and fix several bugs (see related story).

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.