Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-04-20/Technology report

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Please note that some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone 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.

Bug fixes

 * For some pages with suppressed edits, the edits were sometimes still showing up when one was logged out due to the pages being cached on the squid servers. Suppressed edit transactions are now committed before the pages are sent to the squid server, and the cached history views are forced to refresh. (r49592, bug 18450)
 * Selective deletion of individual old image versions was broken in r48277, but has since been fixed. (r48837, bug 18171)

New features

 * New revision parser functions have been added including, , , , , and  (r49575, bug 6092). Note: this was reverted a month and a half later in r51424.

Other news

 * According to Brion Vibber, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, after discussion the Wikimedia Projects have requested to opt-out of the Phorm / BT Webwise system, to avoid violating the privacy of the projects' users. Phorm, which was developed as a targeted advertising system based on traffic analysis, has been the subject of a petition, and an open letter has gone to many major Internet companies asking them to opt out of the system, which is planned by three major UK ISPs.
 * Wikimedia developer Michael Dale, who is working on improving video and multimedia functionality in MediaWiki, has also been working on improving JavaScript handling within MediaWiki. He is working to make it so that JavaScript code can be added with a centralized loader in a single request.  The developers also indicate that they will include the jQuery core library in what gets loaded, which means that they can reduce the size of existing JavaScript files including wikibits.js, mwsuggest.js, and common.js, to reduce the overall amount of JavaScript loaded.  These changes may require some minor adjustments to existing skins.