Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-10-19/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.

Bots approved
Three bot tasks were approved this past week:
 * LSG1-Bot (task 1) — to add interwiki links between the German and English Wikipedia projects.
 * ChzzBot (task 1) — to deliver ad-hoc messages to members of the WikiProject Zoroastrianism.
 * Robert SkyBot (task 3) — to remove links to Table of content pages on Books after they are deleted.

Bug fixes

 * Special:Contributions no longer shows diff links for new revisions. (r57727, bug 21114)
 * The "Other statistics" header is no longer displayed on Special:Statistics when that section is empty. (r57723, bug 21113)

Other news

 * The Wikimedia Usability Initiative conducted user-testing last Wednesday and Thursday, involving eight individuals in the San Francisco area. The testers tried editing with beta features (Acai and Babaco), including the new Vector skin and enhanced edit toolbar.  Through the testing, the Usability team identified areas for further improvement.
 * The Wikimedia Foundation has hired Guillaume Paumier to serve as the Product Manager for the Multimedia Usability Project.
 * Editors were not able to save changes on Wikipedia for approximately 20 minutes on October 19. This was due to a bug with memcaching that caused srv156 to stop responding after some code was scapped.
 * Tim Starling approved new svn committers, including MaxSem (to work on SQLite support), Juliano (extensions work) and Fenzik (extensions and core code).