Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-12-14/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
Six new bot tasks were approved this past week:
 * RSElectionBot – Operated by User:Rspeer, the bot will make a standard page in Wikipedia space that lists people who have voted in the December 2009 ArbCom election.
 * AnomieBOT (task 33) - To replace templates such as cbb link when no longer necessary with the generated wikilink to reduce the expensive parser function count.
 * AnomieBOT (task 35) - To move single-day articles (e.g. December 1, 2003) in Category:Days in 2003 and Category:Days in 2005 to the corresponding Portal:Current events subpage.
 * AnomieBOT (task 36) - To clean up miscategorized pages, such as ensuring that Category:Redirects contains only pages and categories about redirects, and not actual redirects.
 * SmackBot (task 21) - Operated by User:Rich Farmbrough, to replace Category:Articles lacking sources, which was added by User:Erik9bot, with an unreferenced tag.
 * Xqbot (task 2) - To cleanup double redirects.

Bug fixes

 * When querying list=usercontribs with the API and no user specified, the API will now return an error rather than hanging the server trying to scan the entire revisions table. (r59953, bug 21817)
 * When requesting (with query parameters) a special page that redirects, the query parameters will now be carried over to the redirect page. (r59906, bug 21803)

Site configuration and database changes

 * It is now possible to import pages with their full histories to the English Wikipedia from Meta and the German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish and Nostalgia Wikipedias. To request an import, see Requests for page importation. (bug 20280)
 * Revisions that show a 2004 page move from to Community Portal are now accessible. They were previously listed under an invalid title due to page move vandalism. Although they could be found through deleted contributions, they could not be undeleted or moved without the help of a system administrator. (bug 13729)

Other news

 * On December 10, Wikipedia database servers were upgraded to run MySQL version 5.1 from version 4.0.
 * The master database server for English Wikipedia went down on Saturday, December 12 around 21:30 UTC, causing an outage that lasted for approximately 15 minutes before server admins resolved the problem.
 * There is a bug in php 5.3.1 with the __call function, which causes a breakage in MediaWiki. This means that MediaWiki does not support php 5.3.1 at this time.