Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-01-28/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.

Preprocessor-related
The introduction of the new preprocessor (see related story), which is a configuration change, fixed many bugs, mostly to do with section editing.
 * Section edit links are now linked to edit the correct section, or alternatively removed, in all the following cases where they previously were incorrect in some way:
 * The section header uses == signs and is inside the parameter of an unclosed template (this markup is incorrect anyway, but it made it difficult to section-edit the article to correct the situation previously). (bug 2375)
 * Section headers made with &lt;h2&gt;, etc., tags, now do not produce an edit link at all; previously they were incorrect when inside templates. (This makes it possible to create a section with no edit link, for instance in a template, without affecting other section edit links on the page.) (bug 4034)
 * A template contains section headers inside &lt;noinclude&gt; or &lt;includeonly&gt;. (bug 6563)
 * A template contains section headers and is transcluded on the same page more than once. (bug 7083)
 * A page contains a &lt;h2&gt;-style heading after a ==-style heading. (bug 7713)
 * There is other markup on the same line as the heading. (Note that although the section edit link will now be correct if it appears, such constructs may not necessarily create a section edit link at all.) (bug 9156)
 * A section with ==-style markup is passed as a parameter to a template. (bug 11911)
 * Parser functions are no longer double-parsed. This caused several unexpected errors; some relating to template parameters (like ) inside parser functions are documented at ParserFunctions/5678, and also allowed ! to sometimes separate template parameters (that template now never separates template parameters, although it can still be used in the other contexts in which it was used). (bug 5678)
 * References in a branch of a #if: or similar parser function no longer appear on the page if that branch is not selected. (bug 9083)

Other fixed bugs

 * Emails sent via Special:Emailuser are no longer malformed if the user who sends the email has a comma in their username. (r30045, bug 12327)
 * Special:Expandtemplates now correctly handles includeonly/noinclude, nested templates, and template parameters. ( and, bugs bug 12726 and bug 12737)
 * There is now a log entry created when an administrator protects a page against edits but not moves. (r30158, bug 12790)
 * Non-administrators can now use Special:Export to get a machine-readable version of the history of a page in the MediaWiki: namespace. (r30160, bug 12793)
 * External links in &lt;imagemap&gt; tags are no longer double-escaped. (r30178, bug 12806)

New features

 * It's now possible to protect nonexistent pages in the Image: namespace to prevent an image with that name being uploaded. (r30031, bug 12727)
 * The error messages shown when Special:Import fails can now be customised (via MediaWiki:Import-parse-failure, MediaWiki:Import-noarticle, MediaWiki:Import-nonewrevisions, and MediaWiki:Xml-error-string). (r30053, bug 6436)
 * There were several changes to the API:
 * It's now possible to |siteinfo query the API to determine whether API modules exist and what parameters they take. (r30062, bug 12718)
 * It's now possible to request a random page in a namespace from the API. (r30217, bug 12816)
 * The meta=userinfo query now allows a user information query for other users (via the uiuser parameter), and/or to query a user's server edit count (uiprop=editcount). Note that the output format has changed. ( and )
 * The prop=imageinfo query now uses the iilimit, iistart, and iiend parameters, rather than iihistory. It also now accepts the iiurlwidth and iiurlheight parameters. ( and )
 * The [ 'Modern' skin] is now available via Special:Preferences. (r30063, bug 12740)
 * Special:Mypage and Special:Mytalk now accept the 'section' parameter. (r30068, bug 12506)
 * Special:CreateAccount and Special:Userlogin/signup now exist as internal links to the special page that allows creation of a new username. (r30070, bug 11897)
 * There is now a drop-down list of deletion reasons for images as well as articles (controlled by MediaWiki:Filedelete-reason-dropdown). (r30122, bug 12214)

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.