Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-02-01/Technology report

Usability beta supplemental release
On the Wikimedia Tech Blog, Trevor Pascal announced that the Usability Team is preparing a supplemental release that will "bring more stability and functionality" to the current Babaco usability beta. The largest change is a switch away from the previous HTML textarea to an HTML iframe and a special design mode supported by modern browsers. This will allow for future functionality such as collapsible templates and syntax highlighting.

Other improvements include a more accurate table of contents with controls for expanding, collapsing, and resizing, a link dialog that intelligently detects whether the user intends to make an internal or external link, and language specific icons for features like bolding and italics. According to the post, the upgrades will be deployed "in the coming days".

Software enhancements
The following changes were made to the MediaWiki software this week. There will be a delay of up to a few months before changes take effect on Wikimedia wikis.


 * Enable creation of templates that substitute their contents when the template itself is substituted. (Bug 22297)
 * Make information on a global user's unified accounts available through the API. (Bug 22312)

Bots approved
Three new bot tasks were approved this past week.


 * KittyBot – Recategorize pages in categories renamed via CFD.
 * RjwilmsiBot (Task 2) – Tag redirect pages with various templates specified at WP:TMR.
 * WildBot (Task 3) – Check pages with links to sections of other articles to ensure that the section header or other anchor actually exists, and tag the linking article if not.