Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-09-08/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

 * An error in a software update this week meant that making null edits to sections ended up blanking them instead; it was fixed shortly afterwards. (r40107, bug 15340)
 * The "invert selection" checkbox in multiple namespace selection (such as on Special:Search) now correctly inverts a selection consisting of (main) and no other namespaces. (r40113, bug 15342)
 * The "Go" button on Special:Recentchanges and Special:Watchlist has now been moved to a correctly formatted location, rather than on a line by its own. (r40122, bug 15172)
 * Sortable tables now correctly sort currencies written with the yen sign. (r40314, bug 15405)
 * The API now always informs a user or bot of the length of time it has to wait when login attempts via the API have been throttled. (r40446, bug 15479)
 * Anonymous users again receive the new-messages bar when a user edits their user-talk page. (N.B. This bug was a different one to the infamous bug 9213, despite having similar symptoms, and much easier to fix.) (r40461, bug 15292)
 * Editing anonymously via the API no longer causes an internal server error. (r40493, bug 15420)
 * When blocking a user via the API, a request to disable autoblocks is now honoured. (r40494, bug 15486)
 * Special:Recentchangeslinked no longer has a redundant submit button. (r40458, bug 15482)
 * It's now again possible to search for pages with a particular prefix via the API when that prefix ends with a slash. (r40432, bug 15471)

New features

 * A new magic word counts the number of users in a particular user group (such as the number of bureaucrats or rollbackers); for instance:   gives . (r40116, bug 13471)
 * EXIF data extracted from images (which is shown below the image as metadata) now contains information about the flash settings used to make the image, if available. (r40164, bug 11884)
 * Special:Statistics now calculates the number and percentage of active users on a wiki, as well as the total number of users. (r40279 & r40360, bug 13585)
 * It's now possible to patrol pages via the API (r40435, bug 15445) and purge pages via the API (r40459, bug 15466).
 * The watchlist entry for a protected page now contains a link to its history. (r40502, bug 14119)
 * Special:Protectedtitles can now be filtered by protection level the same way Special:Protectedpages can. (r40503, bug 12961)
 * When a user attempts to edit a protected page, the relevant excerpt from the protection log which explains why the page is protected is now shown on the edit page. (r40509, bug 6179)
 * Default values for the input boxes on the protection form can now be given via the URL on links to it. (r40518, bug 12750)
 * CSS classes have been added to the text areas of semi-protected and of protected pages (thus allowing them to be styled differently, if required). (r40519, bug 11825)
 * Edits made by new users are now marked as such in Special:Recentchanges. (r40535, bug 3226)
 * It's now possible to request the API to give information about the type of log action when asking for log entries from Recent Changes. (r40529, bug 15492)
 * Special:Listusers can be filtered to show only users with at least one edit. (r40556, bug 10815)

Other technology news

 * A mistake by developers led to the accidental deletion of the most current version of about 3000 images; all but 496 were recovered almost immediately from duplicate images, caches, and recent backups. (A list of the images that were missing at that point is at Missing images 2008-09.) Since then, many other of the images have been recovered, and it is believed that fewer than 50 of them are still missing.

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.