Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-13/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.

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


 * AnomieBOT 31: To move translated page from articles to their corresponding talk pages.
 * EarwigBot I 3: To assist WikiProject United States presidential elections by tagging certain articles that are within the scope of the project with WikiProject United States presidential elections.

This week's discussion report contains information on current bot requests and related discussions.

Intermittent server issues
Intermittent problems have hit both editors and readers of the Wikimedia Foundation projects recently. In an incident unrelated to the power outages of last week, servers have been suffering from large amounts of traffic - trying to fulfil so many requests at the same time that few are dealt with successfully and in a timely fashion. At the worst point, all Wikimedia Foundation projects simultaneously experienced these issues (unlike with similar outages, which have in the past affected only individual servers, limiting their negative effect). The exact cause is as of yet unknown, but preliminary investigations by the developers have suggested the source of the traffic was the Network File System (NFS) and not HTTP requests. This would rule out the idea of a simple external traffic spike, such as that which overloaded servers after the death of Michael Jackson recently.

Commons is still (Sunday) suffering from an image server overload, with some queries timing out, and others taking a disproportionate amount of time to complete. Disabling the CentralNotice has eased the problems in the interim. (Technical village pump). The Wikimedia Techblog also discusses the problem.

Other news

 *  tags (i.e. HTML links) no longer have both a "name" and "id" attribute for section linking purpose. The former, required for compatibility with Netscape Navigator 4, has been dropped in favour of cleaner code. Bug 19576.
 * The new enhanced toolbar of the usability project was again made available after having been disabled earlier in the week due to performance issues and bugs.
 * Several problems and incompatibilities surrounding the new "Vector" skin, which had emerged after its first iteration was released for testing, were fixed in the skin's development version. The changes have not yet been made generally available.