Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-08-25/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

 * Renames made before 26 August 2007 now show correctly in the rename log. (r39840, bug 15269)
 * Special:Search, when accessed via the text of a redlinked page, now no longer searches for underscores instead of spaces in the title of the redlinked page. (r40043, bug 15264)

New features

 * Special:Watchlist now looks and behaves the same way as Special:Recentchanges. (r39839, bug 15157)
 * See also the next section; several features were added with configuration changes this week.

Configuration changes

 * The GlobalBlocking extension has been enabled on Wikimedia wikis, allowing users to be blocked simultaneously on all wikis. Global blocks can only be added or removed by stewards; however, English Wikipedia administrators can allow users to edit on the English Wikipedia despite a global block (so the user would be blocked everywhere except the English Wikipedia) via Special:GlobalBlockWhitelist. (Administrators on other projects can similarly disable global blocks on those projects.) (r39129, bug 8707)
 * The old query.php API has been disabled; api.php will have to be used instead by bots and scripts. (bug 12881 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12881 )
 * The write API (accessible via api.php, the same as the read API) has been enabled, giving bots and scripts an interface via which to edit Wikipedia. The following write actions are now possible via the API: rollback, delete, undelete, protect, block, unblock, move, edit, emailuser, watch. Anyone can use the write API, but only if they could perform the action normally; for instance, anonymous users cannot edit semiprotected pages using the API, and only administrators can delete pages that way. (bug 14210 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14210 )

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.