Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-05-12/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 RSS feed for Special:Newpages no longer incorrectly prompts for an edit summary. (r34230, bug 13952)
 * Several bugfixes to the API were made this week:
 * Admins and bots can again query large numbers of titles in one API query (rather than being limited to 50). (r34296, bug 13965)
 * The API allpages query now honours the apfrom parameter when sorting in decending order. (r34361, bug 13993)
 * The query-continue for alllinks queries now works correctly when there are a large number of links to the same page. (r34392, bug 14018)
 * Image redirects now work correctly when viewing the redirected image page itself. (r34568, bug 13943)

New features

 * There is now an option to watchlist a user's User and User Talk pages when blocking them. (r34307, bug 13950)
 * API recentchanges queries now allow an rcshow=patrolled option to filter out patrolled (or non-patrolled) changes; note that on the English Wikipedia, the only patrolled changes will be page creations and log entries (log entries are always considered patrolled by the software). (r34394, bug 14013)
 * The list of templates used on an article (shown at the bottom of the edit page) is now sorted, even when previewing a page. (r34485, bug 12644)
 * API queries for the interwiki map now distinguish between interlanguage links (which appear in the 'in other languages' box unless quoted with a colon, like de:) and interwiki links (which appear as ordinary links, like w:). (r34499, bug 14028)
 * The API queries list=allusers and list=users now each support displaying all information that was available from the other (thus adding usprop=registration and auprop=blockinfo). (r34500, bug 14022)
 * Special:Whatlinkshere now supports listing image inclusion links; although these were available on the image page anyway, that list is limited to 500 entries whereas the Special:Whatlinkshere list can be paged through any number of entries. (bug 3759 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3759 ; r34320 and r34507)

Configuration changes

 * Two new user groups were added this week. Each can be granted and revoked by administrators; note that all administrators gain the benefit of these groups regardless of whether they have them or not (much the same way as with rollback).
 * The ipblock-exempt group allows users to edit via a blocked IP; in order to block a user with ipblock-exempt, it is necessary to block their username. (see related story) (bug 9862 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9862 )
 * The accountcreator group allows users to create more than 6 accounts per day (this limit is an anti-sockpuppetry measure, but used to cause problems at Request an account, as checks for conflicting accounts need to be done by non-administrators). (bug 13498 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13498 )

Other technology news

 * Wikipedia was down for a while at about 17:40 on 5 May; this was due to some code related to global groups (e.g. granting +rollbacker to all a user's Single User Login accounts) accidentally being deployed before the servers had been prepared for it.

Breaking changes

 * The deprecated usage of titles= rather than bltitle= in a list=backlinks API query has been removed. (r34518, bug 14021)

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.