Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-06-18/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 live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.46.0-wmf.2 (2600406), and changes with a version number higher than that will not yet be active.

• A bug which caused the interface for some registered user contribution pages to display as though they were contribution pages for anonymous users was fixed. (r22969, bug 10247)
• Some code was added to prevent the diff display breaking on some old Mozilla versions. (r22970, bug 9948)
• Some bugs in the API were corrected:
  • The output when an interwiki link title like de:API is passed as an input no longer produces bogus results. (r22974, bug 10147)
  • A bug meaning that there was no legal combination of parameters that would use the watchlist as a generator for a complex API query was fixed. (r23043, bug 10275)
• Paging forwards and then backwards on categories containing large numbers of images now returns the correct page of images rather than a blank page. (r23012, bug 10265)
• When the number of jobs in the job queue reaches 0, the approximate number of jobs shown on Special:Statistics now gives the exact correct value of 0 rather than 1. (r23057, bug 10228)

• It is now possible to specify an 'editintro' on a link to edit a page, which changes the text above the edit box; the syntax is to put &editintro=URLencoded_name_of_editintro_page at the end of the URL. (r22905, bugs 5175 and 10215)
• A new interface message MediaWiki:Modifiedarticleprotection is used as the log entry when the protection level for a page is changed, rather than the previous generic 'protection' message. (r22947, bug 8734)
• The maximum length of a customized user signature on a given wiki can now be limited (see 'Configuration changes' below). (r22960, bug 8458)
• Some more features were added to the API:
  • It is now possible to query the API for a list of valid interwiki prefixes, using the meta=siteinfo parameter. (r22975, bug 10096)
  • The results of a query (prop=links) on the links from a page can now be filtered by namespace. (r23044, bug 10275)
  • It is now possible to query for a page's protection level. (r23052, bug 10260)

• The maximum customized signature length $wgMaxSigChars on the English Wikipedia has been set to its default value of 255; any signatures longer than this should be changed. (This value can be changed by developers.)

• 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.