Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-11-16/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
One new bot task has been approved:
 * Full-date unlinking bot (task 1) – The bot will only unlink full dates. The details of operation and exceptions are available on User:Full-date unlinking bot.

Bug fixes

 * action=edit in the API no longer allows creating invalid titles that look like interwiki titles. (r58649, bug 20967)

New features

 * The Global usage extension has been enabled on Wikimedia Commons, to show where files are being used across multiple language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects.
 * The $wgUseInstantCommons setting has been added to allow easy enabling of Commons as a remote image repository for 3rd party wikis. (r58652)
 * The ability to protect files without protecting the file (image description) pages has been added. (r58537, bug 6579)

Other news

 * Wikipedia was down for approximately 15 minutes on November 16, when a software update was being pushed live that caused a memcache failure and database overload.