Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-26/Technology report

MediaWiki 1.16
On 9 April, lead software engineer Tim Starling switched the servers of the Wikimedia Foundation to a beta version of the upcoming MediaWiki 1.16 software. Although some of the most important 1.16 changes had already been applied to the server park, this was the first major software update since July 2009, when MediaWiki 1.15 was released. The switch itself was relatively uneventful and Wikipedia was back in business after just a few hours. As expected after 10 months of development, a substantial amount of problems and oversights were discovered in the hours and days following the switch to the new software.
 * Several problems in wikis of languages such as Malay.
 * Garbled thumbnails for videos. Bug 23160
 * Broken edit conflict detection. Bug 23139

You can find details about the MediaWiki 1.16 changes in the release notes and some highlights follow:
 * The order of the "diff" and "history" links was switched on Contributions pages in order to be consistent with the Recent Changes views and the Watchlist. Bug 2971
 * Math images now have a transparent background. Bug 8
 * Support for HTML 5.
 * First letter capitalization can now be a per-namespace setting Bug 13750
 * Rewritten Special:Upload that is more extensible and has improved warning and error reporting.
 * You can no longer upload files of one file type on top of a file of another filetype.

Other changes

 * On 7 April, a security issue with the login process was discovered and fixed. The fix caused many bots to temporarily be offline, but software updates for the major bot frameworks, such as AWB and Pywikipedia, were quickly released by the maintainers of the various bot frameworks.
 * Daniel Kinzler (WMDE) announced the availability of the PagedTiffHandler extension. This new extension will allow the creation of thumbnails for (paged) TIFF files and was developed by Hallo Welt under contract of Wikimedia Germany. When the code is fully reviewed by the Wikimedia Foundation staff, it is hoped that this extension will be deployed on Wikimedia Commons. This will fulfill a longstanding request by the image restorationists for support of the TIFF format that their source material and restoration work normally use.