Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-02-12/Technology report

Software evolution does not always mean that features are being added. It also means that old fat is being trimmed. It is no different for MediaWiki. A while ago, developers started discussing about removing some user preferences to reduce "option bloat" (see also 52807). Last week, the advanced options dealing with page presentation (such as how to format links to non-existent pages, and whether to justify paragraphs) were removed, and it did not go unnoticed, but discussion did not grow to VisualEditor-esque proportions.

In brief
Highlights from Tech news:


 * Recent software changes
 * The Vector search box was changed to fix old display and accessibility issues; for example, you can now use full-text search even if you have disabled JavaScript. Please report any problems you see. The option to disable the "simplified search bar" on Vector will also be removed. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/50660] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/25127] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/24248] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/82100/] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/99422/]
 * You are now notified when someone adds a link to your user page on wikis where it didn't work before (wikis with dates in the year-month-day order, including Hungarian, Japanese, Korean and some variants of Chinese). [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/108329/]
 * VisualEditor news
 * You can now set media items' alt text and position, and directly set their size, in the media tool. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/38129] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/51293]
 * The gallery tool was improved and several issues were fixed. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/60307] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/60502] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/60779]
 * Problems
 * On 3 February, all wikis were broken for about an hour due to a traffic balancing issue. [//wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20140203-LVS]
 * On 6 February, some wikis were broken for about half an hour in total due to a problem with the Math extension (Editor note: it actually lasted two days, and only affected math rendered in PNG format.).