Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-04-07/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.2 (8fd6c9c), 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 PHP and XML output of Special:Allmessages no longer incorrectly expands templates. (r32700, bug 13431)
Renaming a user now moves the logs of blocks and user right changes applied to that user to their new username. This does not apply retroactively to previously renamed users. (r32816, bug 7011)
JSON output from the API now correctly marks strings as strings even if they are the string representation of an integer. (r32820, bug 11633)
JSON callbacks from the API now allow square brackets. (r32822, bug 12136)

New features

There have been some major improvements to what the watchlist is capable of watching (r32685):
- Watching an image description page will now display a watchlist entry when the image itself is overwritten (by uploading a new version of it). (bug 778)
- Watching an existing page now shows log entries for that page in the watchlist (for instance, page moves, protections and deletions). (bug 5546)
Special:Recentchanges now has an option to show only bot-flagged edits (edits made by bot-flagged users or bot rollback). (r32696, bug 13441)
It's now possible to obtain a list of user groups and permissions using the API (which explains which user groups are needed to perform which actions, e.g. you need to be an administrator to delete pages). (r32740, bug 13603)
Logs now use timestamp paging, making log links stabler and removing the 10000 offset limit restriction. (r32685, bug 5446)
Special:RevisionDelete expanded to include files and log events. Not yet enabled on Wikimedia sites. (r32278)
Private logging support added, starting with a log for Special:RevisionDelete items hidden from Sysops (or unhidden from them) (r32685)

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: April Fools' WikiWorld News and notes In the news Dispatches Features and admins Technology report Arbitration report

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