Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-08-03/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 task were approved for operation this week. These were:


 * Xenobot 6.1: To standardise stub templates to use asbox.
 * SmackBot XV: To replace start date and end dates with templates that emit microformat data.

New features

 * A new hook (BeforeInitialize) has been added in includes/Wiki.php, before the performRequestForTitle function. (r54318, bug 15209)
 * A legend and tooltips has been added to Special:Watchlist, to indicate what the various recent changes flags mean. (r54242, r54248)
 * The MediaWiki API has a new setting that can be used to permit cross-site Ajax requests to the API from any domain, or to a list of whitelisted domains, or those that match particular regex expressions. (r54127, bug 19907)
 * New parameters (size, wordcount, timestamp, snippet) have been added to list=search in ApiQuerySearch.php. (r53904)

Other news

 * Changes have been made to the CodeReview extension to integrate parser tests. For any code check-ins to the trunk code, parser tests will be run and the results will be displayed in CodeReview. (message at wikitech-l)
 * Systems were down on July 31 at 12:00 GMT to allow the primary router at the Tampa hosting facility to be rebooted. (, wikitech-l)