Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-03-24/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

 * The total numbers of articles and subcategories in a category are now displayed correctly. (r32085, bug 1212)
 * When an invalid title is given to an API query, the rest of the query now continues as normal. (r32109, bug 13390)
 * A generator=backlinks API query now honours the gblredirect parameter. (r32125, bug 13419)
 * Ogg-contained audio and video now play back correctly in Safari. (bug 11249 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11249 )
 * The audio/video playback no longer confuses the media player Totem with QuickTime. (r32130, bug 13401)
 * Some invalid XHTML on the protection page was fixed. (r32147, bug 13428)
 * Special:Search now deals with unusual characters like newlines in the search string correctly. (r32148, bug 9403)
 * The punctuation on the enhanced watchlist has been corrected. (r32194, bug 13440)
 * API queries for category members in the main namespace now return the correct results. (r32279, bug 13465)
 * Special:Search with no search query now gives the option to select which namespaces to search in. (bug 8444 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8444 )

New features

 * There is a new special page Special:FileDuplicateSearch that allows you to search for all images which are completely identical to a given image (that is, same format, pixel-identical, same metadata, etc.). (r32180, bug 1459)

Other changes

 * The eiredirect option to the embeddedin API query has been removed, because it didn't actually make any difference to the query's results. (r32125, bug 13418)
 * A category table is currently being added to the Wikimedia databases; when it is complete, it will allow various category-related bugs to be fixed (mostly relating to counting the number of items in a category correctly). (bug 13326 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13326 )
 * The SHA1 hash of uploaded images is now stored; this makes checks for duplicate images easier (and has made some of this week's image-related changes possible). (bug 5763 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5763 )
 * The search feature on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia wikis has been synchronised with the search feature used by most small MediaWiki wikis. As a result, several bugs have been fixed and features have been added to the search form (for instance, a search within the image namespace will now display the images as well as the text on the image pages).

Other technology news

 * A test of flagged revisions (the 'stable versions' system) is currently taking place at http://en.labs.wikimedia.org (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.