Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-09-15/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 error message given when incorrectly including a parameter in a &lt;references&gt; tag is now factually correct. (r40632, bug 15517)
 * The API now correctly returns data about pages which are both cascade-protected and which were originally protected before Wikipedia upgraded to MediaWiki 1.10. (r40678, bug 15535)
 * Log entries for protection are no longer cut off when a very long protection summary is used (although existing such entries will still be cut off). (r40713, bug 12234)
 * Edits by bots with newly-created accounts will no longer appear on []. (r40715, bug 15554)
 * The XML returned by the API now has a correct encoding declaration. (r40700, bug 15497)
 * Deletion log fragments are now shown to an anonymous user who gives the commands to create a page (and fails), just like they are shown to other users who try to create a page and fail. (r40723, bug 15551)
 * When a user logs in when following a link from Special:Preferences to the login page, they are now returned to Special:Preferences rather than Main Page after the login (most other pages work like this, but previously Special:Preferences didn't). (r40773, bug 12284)
 * The paging links on Special:Newpages now work correctly when the user has set a preference other than 50 as the default number of entries to show and is using that default value. (r40811, bug 15598)

New features

 * When protecting a page, a drop-down box of commonly-used protection times is now available. (r40555, bug 10188)
 * It is now possible to set separate expiry times for move-protection and edit-protection of a page. (r40770, bug 12650)
 * #expr: now allows a Unicode minus (&minus;) as well as a hyphen (-) to indicate a negative number or subtraction. (r40762, bug 15349)

Configuration changes

 * Pages in the User talk: namespace are no longer searchable by search engines. (bug 13890 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13890 )

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.