Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-06-05/Technology report

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Parser fixes

Brion Vibber has made various fixes to the parser in an attempt to remove the need for HTML Tidy, a software program that fixes HTML errors, but has various glitches. Many of the fixes involve problems with the parsing of extensions such as <ref>.

Last week in MediaWiki software

New functionality

Smart edit summaries for redirect pages (i.e. "Redirecting to PAGENAME"). (Rob Church)
Allow customisation of robot policies per-namespace. (Tim Starling)
Add "edit based on this version" links to diff. views. (Jens Frank)
Add job queue count to action=raw output on Special:Statistics. (Tim Starling)
{{#language:}} magic word added. For example, {{#language:es}} produces español. (Rob Church)

Bug fixes

Ensure that page links viewed after undeleting a page always appear as blue links. (Rob Church)
Improve handling of large data sets when adding template links updates to the job queue. (Brion Vibber)

Last week in servers

Portal namespace conflicts fixed on Chinese Wikipedia
bart added to installation group, allowing it to receive software updates with other servers.
New motherboard installed on srv3, new drive and OS installed on srv119
"Wikipedia Incubator" created as alternative to initially keeping new languages on Meta.
19 new Wikisources added.
New drive and OS installed on srv51.

Also this week: Hiding revisions — Indianapolis Star — M.A.N.I.A. — External tools — News and notes — Press coverage — Features and admins — B.R.I.O.N. — T.R.O.L.L.