Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-01-17/Technology report

This is a summary of recent (as in, since the last technology report was written) 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 expiry time of seven days has been added for temporary passwords. When a temporary password expires, the old password will still work. (r45503, bug 2242)
 * The categories parameter has been added to the API, to "prop=category", providing a more efficient way to check if a page is in a certain category. (r45733, bug 16844)
 * When patrolling new pages, the diff link for redirect pages automatically follows the redirect, but that has been changed, with "redirect=no" added to the diff link. That allows checking for other material on the redirect page, besides the redirect link. (r45781, bug 14353)

New features

 * The ability to rename files (such as images) has been re-enabled for administrators on all Wikimedia projects.
 * The Drafts extension has been enabled on the test wiki .  Right now, when you are editing a page and your computer freezes or you accidentally close the browser, you will lose what you working on.  With the drafts extension, your work will be saved (every 2 minutes).  When you come back to the page you were editing, and click "edit", your draft will be there.  The extension also gives the option of intentionally saving a draft for later, and will save drafts for up to 30 days. The extension was developed by Trevor Parscal, who is one of the staff developers.  After some testing, the extension may be enabled on the English Wikipedia and/or other Wikimedia sites.
 * The $wgFileExtensions configuration variable has been made accessible through the API. (r45754, bug 17025)
 * Configuration variables in the LocalSettings.php file, such as $wgMaxUploadSize, have been made accessible via the API. (r45810, bug 17027)
 * Special:Deletedcontributions can now be accessed by the API. (r45678, bug 16858)

Other news

 * The Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a full-time system administrator, to be based in San Francisco, to monitor, maintain, and document the Wikimedia servers, running Wikipedia and the other projects. See the Wikimedia Foundation site for details.
 * Two new web servers have been ordered for the toolserver &mdash; one to be used as a database server, and the other to replace the current web server. The new, more powerful hardware should improve performance for the toolserver.  A third server, to be located in Amsterdam, has also been ordered for storing backup, live copies of all media files.  Once the new servers arrive, database replication will be back to normal.

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.


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