Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-06-15/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.

MediaWiki updated on Wikipedia
The version of MediaWiki running on Wikimedia servers has been updated from r48811 to r51904 (r51864 for extensions). The last code update prior to this was on March 25. This means that many previously mentioned bug fixes and new features will now be available. If you notice any new bugs, you can ask about them on the Village pump (technical) or the tech IRC channels, and they can be reported via the bug tracker. The update caused a number of user scripts (including Twinkle) to break; this was quickly noticed and fixed for those better maintained but errors may linger in older scripts.

Bots approved
7 bots or bot tasks were approved for operation this week. These included:

LaraBot (task request), for warning editors who create unreferenced biographies of living people; Erik9bot (task request), for performing a range of categorisations and maintenance edits on articles about chemical elements and their isotopes.

Also approved were MastiBot (task request), RedBot (task request), AHbot (task request), WikiStatsBOT (task request) and Egmontbot (task request). This week's discussion report contains information on bot requests and related discussions.

Bug fixes

 * Category Tree has been updated so that [+] expand links are not hidden. (r51817, bug 18203)
 * The new section link is no longer displayed when viewing old talk page revisions. (r51822)

New features

 * DISPLAYTITLE now can accept some wiki markup including single quotes. (r51594)
 * The default sortkey has been changed (bug 16552) so there's no longer any need to add  when categorising templates.

Other news

 * MediaWiki 1.15.0 is now available as a stable release.