Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-07-28/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.

Fixed bugs

 * The new double-redirect-fixing feature now correctly fixes redirects to sections of a moved page. (r37999, bug 14904)
 * Setting an explicit limit=50 on Special:Recentchanges now gives 50 entries, rather than taking the number of entries set in the reader's preferences. (r38036, bug 14659)

New features

 * Double redirects (redirects which redirect to another redirect) created by new pagemoves are now fixed automatically by the software; edits made by such fixing are attributed to User:Redirect fixer, which operates much like a bot (although as a software feature, it only has bot abilities when operated by the MediaWiki software and no special powers when operated by anyone else), in that it works by making edits and does not operate instantly (but rather when it gets round to fixing the redirect). See this message for more details. (Note that the feature has changed slightly since that message; in order to prevent a double redirect being fixed, you now need to place __STATICREDIRECT__ on the double redirect page). (r37928, bug 4578)
 * New magic words __INDEX__ and __NOINDEX__ control whether a page can be indexed by search engines (although note that Wikimedia's robots.txt, which excludes things like AfD subpages, takes precedence over this). The keywords do nothing in "content namespaces" ― which means the main namespace on the English Wikipedia, but other sites may have additional content namespaces. (r37973, bug 8068)

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.