Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-20/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.

Image slowness
Developers have been working on various behind-the-scenes developments this week to ease, combat, and in the long term prevent, the problems of last week. Many of the problems have been related to a fault with the server software (and has been reported) when servers neared full capacity. Instead of filling up one server, then moving onto the next (as had been originally planned), some of the files have already been transferred from one to the other, which should solve the intermittent problems of late. (Wikimedia Techblog.)

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


 * Numbo3-bot 3: To update Template:Linked on Google News hourly.
 * ClickBot 2: To split the population field of Infobox UK place.
 * Botryoidal: To remove the deprecated nocat parameter from Surname.

Also approved were XeBot and EarwigBot I 4.