Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-03-03/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

 * If an image's name has more than one period in it, the image's extension is now interpreted to be the part after the last period rather than the first period. (This problem was causing spurious warnings on some image uploads.) (r31246, bug 13143)
 * The message that appears when you try to upload an image to a name that already exists has been fixed; previously the HTML for a link in the message appeared, rather than the link itself. (r31254, bug 13149)
 * Some incorrect CSS in the Classic skin (to do with category links) has been corrected. (r31316, bug 13161)
 * The position of the edit token in the HTML of an edit page has been moved upwards, which should increase the reliability of saving edits for users with slow connections. (r31365, bug 13130)
 * Special:Linksearch can now handle searches for URLs containing two consecutive hyphens; previously such searches caused the page layout to break up badly. (r31427, bug 13207)
 * When the API is pretty-printing its output, it now doesn't incorrectly link double quotes at the end of URLs. (r31452, bug 13218)

New features

 * The __HIDDENCAT__ feature introduced recently has been refined; hidden categories are now not hidden when included on other categories (r31250, bug 13140), are listed in the category Category:Hidden categories (r31262, bug 13106), and are listed at the bottom of the edit page during a preview (in the same way that templates are) (r31257, bug 13102).
 * The API now lists which namespaces have subpages in a query about which namespaces are available. (r31278, bug 13154)
 * A new API feature list=recentchanges&rctitles= makes it possible to get information about recent changes to a particular page (which is mostly useful for determining the rcid of a newly-created page, which is needed to mark it as patrolled). (r31348, bug 12394)
 * Special:Relatedchanges has been added as an alias for Special:Recentchangeslinked. (bug 13112 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13112 )
 * The 'From' and 'To' usernames on Special:Emailuser are now links rather than plain text. (r31394, bug 13031)
 * It is now possible to preload the title of a newly added section the same way that its text can be preloaded in a link to that page, using the URL parameter preloadtitle. (r31419, bug 13100)
 * The action=search API request is now compatible with the Lucene search engine that Wikipedia uses. (r31471, bug 10908)
 * A new ucuserprefix parameter has been added to API requests for user contributions, allowing all users or IPs whose name starts with a certain prefix to be listed; this makes it possible to search for the contributions of IP /8, /16 or /24 ranges (by specifying only the first few parts of the IP). (r31312, bug 13157)

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.