Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-06-14/Technology report

Pending changes goes live
The technical basis for the pending changes trial went live in parts throughout June 14. Developer William Pietri described how the changeover would take place in a Wikimedia techblog post:

This new configuration requires new features, which in turn required substantial code changes to Flagged Revisions. For technical reasons, we can’t release that code just to the English Wikipedia, so we will upgrade all copies of Flagged Revisions in use on Wikimedia Foundation projects. Happily, that will result in a number of minor improvements for all Flagged Revisions users.

We believe this won’t cause any trouble, but if bugs do crop up, we’d like to hear about them. Our team will be standing by, prepared to fix any small issues immediately, or roll back if there are any big problems. In the event, there were no catastrophic errors, though a number of significant bugs - some related to the English Wikipedia's chosen setup, others not so much - needed to be ironed out before usage of the system on the English Wikipedia could begin.

For a non-technical perspective on the developments, see this week's news and notes. Bot operators may also like to take a look at some ideas for new pending changes-related bots here.

Page view statistics broken and fixed
For a while this week page view statistics (collected officially but most commonly viewed on external tools like http://stats.grok.se ) were much lower than expected (up to 80 or more percent so). A number of possibilities were suggested for why this might be, but ultimately the answer lay in the amount of filespace available to the recording software. User:Midom has now reported the problem fixed. It is unlikely that any fix would apply retrospectively, but new dates will be recorded correctly.

In brief
Note: not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at time of writing, or may not in fact be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
 * Bug #5210 has been closed as fixed, allowing for proper handling of when a page is being preloaded.
 * Revision deletion is no longer the default 'enter' action on administrators' page histories (bug #23747)
 * Revision 67975 has gone live, meaning Wikimedia no longer uses the form validation facility built into HTML5. Support for it remains patchy among web browsers, meaning that virtually all users were receiving a worse, rather than better, experience by utilising it. The feature can be turned on again when HTML5 achieves mainstream support.