Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-09-15/Technology report

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.4 (a8dd895), 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.

Fixed bugs

The error message given when incorrectly including a parameter in a <references> tag is now factually correct. (r40632, bug 15517)
The API now correctly returns data about pages which are both cascade-protected and which were originally protected before Wikipedia upgraded to MediaWiki 1.10. (r40678, bug 15535)
Log entries for protection are no longer cut off when a very long protection summary is used (although existing such entries will still be cut off). (r40713, bug 12234)
Edits by bots with newly-created accounts will no longer appear on [1]. (r40715, bug 15554)
The XML returned by the API now has a correct encoding declaration. (r40700, bug 15497)
Deletion log fragments are now shown to an anonymous user who gives the commands to create a page (and fails), just like they are shown to other users who try to create a page and fail. (r40723, bug 15551)
When a user logs in when following a link from Special:Preferences to the login page, they are now returned to Special:Preferences rather than Main Page after the login (most other pages work like this, but previously Special:Preferences didn't). (r40773, bug 12284)
The paging links on Special:Newpages now work correctly when the user has set a preference other than 50 as the default number of entries to show and is using that default value. (r40811, bug 15598)

New features

When protecting a page, a drop-down box of commonly-used protection times is now available. (r40555, bug 10188)
It is now possible to set separate expiry times for move-protection and edit-protection of a page. (r40770, bug 12650)
#expr: now allows a Unicode minus (−) as well as a hyphen (-) to indicate a negative number or subtraction. (r40762, bug 15349)

Configuration changes

Pages in the User talk: namespace are no longer searchable by search engines. (bug 13890)

Ongoing news

Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See mw:Localisation statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla or use Betawiki.


Also this week: Poetlister WikiWorld News and notes Dispatches Technology report Arbitration report

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