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User:Tim Starling/Weekly reports/2008-W08

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I finished the message mode changes project, started last week. I also wrote an extension called EditMessages, which was simply a tool to make this project (and others like it) easier. I updated some documentation. The parser project as a whole is, as far as I am concerned, ready for release.

I fixed a serious bug in the X-Vary-Options feature (see week 6), which was causing pages to be delivered to logged-in users which looked as though they were logged out.

Happy to be free of such mundane user-invisible work, I decided to go on a usability feature spree. I had been building up a list of usability issues which needed to be fixed. Two items on my list are now completed:

  • Maintenance categories like Category:Articles with unsourced statements since December 2007 clutter up the box at the bottom of many Wikipedia articles. I came up with a way to allow editors to hide certain categories from that list, called __HIDDENCAT__. See my wikitech-l post for more details.
  • An improvement to the counterintuitive behaviour of red links for readers who are not familiar with our site.

Traditionally, if you click a link to an article that doesn't exist (a red link), it takes you to an edit page. If you're not allowed to edit, say because you're in a school and your whole school is blocked from editing, an error message is displayed telling you you are blocked. This leads to many complaints from people who thought that the red link was just an ordinary link to another article, and that they must be blocked from reading it.

My feature redirects such blocked requests to the article view page, which explains that the article does not exist, without accusing the reader of vandalism.

Additionally, at Werdna's suggestion, I added some explanatory text to the "title" attribute of red links. In most browsers, this text is displayed when you hover your mouse over the link. The link above to Werdna's user page is a red link at the time of writing, you can test out the feature by hovering your mouse over it.

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