Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-05-19/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

 * API queries when multiple titles and a namespace filter are given no longer time out. (bug 14102 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14102 )
 * The links passed as parameters to MediaWiki:Fileexists-extension now contain the correct namespace, rather than trying to link to the image in the main namespace. (r34742, bug 14111)
 * The spam blacklist now allows users to edit pages which already have blacklisted links on (but still prevents addition of new blacklisted links). (r34769, bug 1505)
 * API log events queries no longer incorrectly return 0 for the log ID. (r34767, bug 10660)
 * Pages transcluding Special:Newpages now again load (for a while, they mistakenly were blank in most browsers, and showed as an internal server error to Internet Explorer). (r34780, bug 14113)
 * Email-blocking users now again prevents them sending email via Special:Emailuser. (r34846, bug 14133)
 * The number of pages in a category occasionally incorrectly counted as negative; when this happens, the number of pages in a category is now recounted to give a correct count (however, the bug that's causing the count to drift off the correct value probably still remains). (r34870, bug 13683)
 * A loophole in the spam blacklist was closed. (r34932, bug 14154)
 * #ifexist: now works on special pages. (r35157, bug 13640)

New features

 * The API action=expandtemplates query now allows a generatexml parameter; if given, it generates an XML parse tree for the text in addition to expanding templates in it. (r34716, bug 13829)
 * Users are now warned on preview if a page exceeds a template limit; in addition, pages exceeding the pre-expand include limit are added to Category:Pages where template include size is exceeded and pages exceeding the template argument size limit are added to Category:Pages containing omitted template arguments. (The names of these categories, and the warning messages, can be customized; see Special:Prefixindex/MediaWiki:Post-expand-template-.) (r35059, bug 14094)

Configuration changes

 * All WikiProject Spam subpages have been added to Wikimedia's robots.txt, making them unsearchable by search engines.
 * The Wikipedia logo was changed to remove an incorrect white border. (bug 14137 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14137 )
 * The definition of 'autoconfirmed' on the English Wikipedia was changed to require 10 edits (by server edit count, so deleted edits are also counted) as well as 4 days before a user becomes autoconfirmed, allowing them to move pages and edit semiprotected pages. There is active discussion on the bug page about whether the limit should have been increased higher. This follows a poll about whether the limit should be increased. (bug 14191 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14191 )
 * The rate limit for rollback on the English Wikipedia was increased to 100 rollbacks per minute, effectively removing it, following a discussion at the proposals village pump. This allows rollbackers to rollback pages more often than was previously possible (administrators and bots are not affected by rate limits). (bug 12760 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12760 )

Other technology news

 * The 'write API' (parts of the API that allow changes to be made to a wiki, rather than merely retrieving information from it) has been enabled on http://test.wikipedia.org/w/api.php.
 * A feature designed to turn pages bold in a watchlist if they had changed since a user's last view was enabled for a while last week; it was turned off again shortly afterwards due to not working properly.
 * Google Maps now embeds links to Wikipedia articles (to see this, select "Wikipedia" under the "more" button at http://maps.google.com); the articles are linked at places determined by the coord template on pages. (This feature was previously available on Google Earth, but not Google Maps.)

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.