Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-11-02/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:
 * SmackBot (task 16) – To migrate geoboxes to a new standard.
 * CobraBot (task 2) – To add Dewey Decimal Classification and Library of Congress Classification data to instances based on ISBNs.
 * ZhBot (task 1) – To replace superseded zh-related templates in Category:Chinese multilingual support templates with master template.

Bug fixes

 * A message has been added to note to Special:Block indicating if the IP is already globally blocked. (r58385, bug 20478)
 * Section edit links have been removed from the edit conflict form. (r58362)
 * HTMLDiff has been removed from MediaWiki, with developers noting this could be salvaged someday as an extension but currently it is a mostly-broken experimental feature that does not belong in the core code. (r58267, bug 19859)

New features

 * Some capability has been added for configuring the /16 limit on range blocks, using the $wgBlockCIDRLimit setting. (r58377, bug 3340)
 * A new hook, getOtherBlockLogLink, has been added, which is called in Special:IPBlockList to show links to block logs of other blocking extensions, such as Extension:GlobalBlocking. (r58192)

Other news

 * Many developers and others heavily involved with other aspects of Wikimedia Commons are preparing for an upcoming meeting later this week in France pertaining to the Ford Foundation-supported Multimedia Usability project.