Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-09-21/Technology report

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. 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.

Software updates
This week saw a major code update, including changes for how MediaWiki handles file uploads and new Upload API capabilities that work with the Firefogg extension for Mozilla Firefox. As part of the updates, the cite features have been updated to allow list-defined references.

Bugs resulting
The software changes resulted in a number of bugs, and caused the pywikipedia Python library used by bots to break. As a result, bots stopped working for a few days.

According to Kozuch, major bugs resulting from the updates have been:
 * 1) Uploading new version of file fails (20677)
 * 2) Commonist upload tool stopped working – errors at upload
 * 3) AWB experiencing ongoing problems (WP:AWB/B). Due to changes in the MediaWiki Software, the current release (4.6) has been broken, and due to some other discovered bugs, a fix cannot be implemented and rolled out as of yet. ApiEdit (4.9) versions work fine.

Compatibility problems were discovered in the Usability Initiative's new edit toolbar, when it was used with Internet Explorer. Due to the bug, developers disabled the new edit toolbar for a few days while the bug was resolved.

A full list is available at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=code-update-regression

Bots approved
Two bots were approved this week: HerculeBot 2, for the transfer of interwiki links from redirects to redirect targets, and Yobot 8 to assist with a previously approved task. There are a number of outstanding requests for bots, which anyone is free to comment on.

New features

 * File renaming has been enabled for admins.

Other

 * The tech team is to add full TIFF support in the near future. This support will help MediaWiki render TIFF images (an image format widely used by museums, archives and in scientific research) so that users can view them in their browsers with a reasonable load time.