Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-05-28/Technology report
Technology report
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
This page covers changes to the MediaWiki software and English Wikipedia site configuration, and other technology news, since the last technology report (on 9 April 2007). Bugfixes and new features that do not affect the English Wikipedia have been omitted from this.
Bugs fixed
- Nested <sub> tags now render correctly. (bug 599)
- Underscores and spaces are now interchangeable when unblocking users. (bug 8573)
- The cascading-protection and regular protection notices now both appear if they both apply. (r21452, bug 9634)
- Changing the page size in the 'What links here' results no longer forgets which namespace was searched for links. (r21440, bug 9630)
- The edit summary for the dummy edit created during cascading protection now indicates that the protection cascades. (r21512, bug 9652)
- A bug which lost the anchor information for links to a page below the logged-in user's stub threshold that contained both a space and an anchor was fixed. (r21635, bug 5959)
- Paging back on Special:Contributions now pages the same distance backwards as paging forwards goes forwards (it was off by 1 before). (r21664, bug 8602)
- Some cases where Internet Explorer was falsely identified as not supporting Unicode were fixed. (r21726, bug 7629)
- If a template redirect whose target contains a section heading is transcluded into a page, the 'edit' link on the heading now links to the correct template. (r21758, bug 9670)
- 'Cite this page' on an old revision now cites that revision rather than the current revision. (r21819, bug 7958)
- For some sequences of headings on a page (such as levels 2, 3, 4, 3, 2 in that order), the Table of Contents is now indented correctly. (r21814, bug 9764)
- An error message shown to bureaucrats when renaming a user in such a way that their new userpage is already taken has been fixed. (r21848, bug 9784)
- It's now impossible to rename pages to have illegal titles starting with a space. (r21853, bug 9780)
- A bug causing the AntiSpoof extension to disallow all names containing Korean characters was fixed. (r21978, bug 7906)
- An interface error when a page with no text is oversighted was fixed. (r21997, bug 9842)
- Horizontal scrollbars no longer appear inappropriately in thumbnails in categories. (r22035, bug 9854)
- A regression causing Special:Contributions to always show 50 edits by default was fixed. (r22010, bug 9808)
- Undeleting a page now updates the history caches. (r21989, bug 2635)
- Usernames containing a # now cause an error rather than being silently truncated. (r22266, bug 9813)
- RSS feeds no longer have a chance of setting the background to the same colour as the text. (r22271, bug 7989)
- Links to nonexistent Special: pages (for instance, Special:Closewindow) now show up as redlinks. (r22450, bug 908)
New features
- It is now possible to undo multiple edits at once. (r20785, bug 8133)
- An <imagemap> now need have no regions other than a default. (r21318, bug 8573)
- Several new fonts were installed in the SVG renderer. (bug 8898)
- Image description pages on Commons can now be searched for via 'Go' on the English Wikipedia. (r21419, bug 5439)
- The number of pages that are cascading protection onto a page is supplied to the relevant system message, making it possible to change the message for singular and plural. (r21510, bug 8664)
- Default automatic deletion summaries are now created for pages regardless of their length. (r21464, bug 9656)
- Special:Filepath now finds images on Commons as well as locally. (r21633, bug 9686)
- Admins can now create accounts for other users at any speed (the limit of 6 new accounts in 1 day still applies to non-admin users). (r21636, bug 9139)
- Image thumbnails are now of better quality. (r21411, bug 6193)
- Bureaucrats can now enter a summary in the log to explain why they have given adminship to a user. (r21683, bug 9693)
- The new message MediaWiki:Autoblockedtext was added; it displays instead of MediaWiki:Blockedtext if the block is an autoblock. (r21827, bug 8868)
- The <references /> tag now generates valid XHTML if there are no references on the page. (r22012, bug 9807)
- The layout of the create-an-account and preferences screens was reorganised to show the hints about a field directly below that field. (r22023, bug 9855)
- A CAPTCHA now appears after an incorrect password is entered when logging in, and other password security measures were taken (bug 9836) (see related story)
- <imagemap> can now contain 'anchor' links to a section of an article. (r21299, bug 8917)
- Redirects are now shown in categories; their appearance can be (and has been) customized to be different from non-redirect entries. (r22156)
- Diff displays are now correctly balanced. (r22204, bug 1229). (The method used to balance it was later updated for some browsers; Internet Explorer 6 and above and Safari will cause long lines to break, Gecko, Firefox and Opera will show scrollbars. (r22227, bug 1438))
- A new special page Special:Withoutinterwiki was added, that displays pages with no interwiki links. (bug 5820)
- When Special:Contributions and/or Special:Watchlist are lagged, a message displays showing how bad the lag is. (r22242, bug 9628)
- Several improvements were made to the query.php and api.php APIs:
- A new query to find out the edit count of a user, according to the server's internally stored edit count data, was added. (r22095)
- Old revisions can now be returned using the 'revid' parameter. (r22249, bug 9938)
- The anonymous contributions from a particular IP address can be queried. (r22251, bug 9927)
- Watchlist-related queries were re-enabled after being changed to use the correct databases. (bug 9482)
- It is now possible to query for a list of images used on a page. (bug 9461)
- It is now possible to limit results to edits made by a particular user. (r22368, bug 8772)
- Error messages can now be rendered in formats other than xmlfm. (r22500, bug 10046)
- The 'border' keyword, which is used the same way as 'thumb' and 'frame', was added to image markup to give a new way to format an image. (r22358, bug 6072)
- New keywords for specifying spacing when symbols are being used in an unusual manner (such as \mathord) were added to the <math> tag markup. (r22478, bug 7993)
Configuration changes
- 'Tidy', which fixes the generated HTML from Wikipedia pages, has been upgraded; wikitext will now render differently in some cases to how it rendered before, [1] and such wikitext will need to be changed.
- It's now possible to use escaped forms of ‏ (a right-to-left mark) written in right-to-left text (so as to cause the text to go right-to-left in the edit box too): &רלמ; and &ررلم; are now enabled on Wikimedia wikis. (Left-to-right marks should still be written in English as usual.) [2]
- User accounts where the password and username were equal can no longer log in. Such users will need to reset their password via email; if no email was provided, then only a developer can restore access to the account.
- It's now possible to transwiki pages from the English Wikipedia to Meta, with the help of a Meta admin. (bug 8557)
- A Table: namespace was created, after discussion at Wikipedia:Proposal for intuitive table editor and namespace and bug 2194, but it had no special properties. After more discussion, it was removed again. All pages that were in that namespace were moved into a pseudonamespace at the time, and now currently reside either in the Template: namespace or User: namespace.
- A hexadecimal number beginning "09 F9" was added to the spam blacklist to prevent it being spammed into articles. It has since been removed from the blacklist. [3]
- Use of the <source> tag (the Highlight extension), which places syntax highlighting on a sample of code, has been enabled. (bugzilla:7163) (Further changes were made to this feature: currently it doesn't link keywords (r22240, bug 9995), and the styling used was made customizable by editing MediaWiki:Geshi.css (r22308, bug 9951).)
- Non-autoconfirmed users can now reupload over files they uploaded themselves. (r21943, bug 5057)
Other technology news
- A read-only WAP version of Wikipedia has been set up at http://en.wap.wikipedia.org.
- A new version of the search feature is being tested at http://ls2.wikimedia.org/ (loaded with some old English Wikipedia search data for testing); feedback would be appreciated.
- Several new Wikimedia wikis were created (Kabyle Wikipedia, Italian Wikiversity, Hakka Wikipedia) and two were closed (Kanuri Wikipedia and Low Saxon Wikiquote).
Ongoing news
- Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla.
- Lists of redirects and new default names (possibly even containing spaces) for the Special: namespace are being sought, even for English-language projects; please post any suggestions you might have on mw:Special page names.
Discuss this story
- I'm not sure about that. The developer who enabled the WAP site was 'Tim' (presumably User:Tim Starling), so if they weren't responsible for it they'll likely know who is. --ais523 08:15, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
I'm also delighted someone has gotten another one of these columns out. I have one correction; it seems that log pages, like Special:Log/stupidity do still show up as blue links, probably because such pages arn't real Special pages, but effectively arguments to the Special:Log page. 66.81.18.159 (really, User:JesseW/not logged in) 01:52, 3 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]