Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-04-14/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.4 (a8dd895), 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 thumb=filename feature that allowed images to be thumbnailed manually (rather than automatically by the software) was accidentally broken, but now works again (this was caused by the same change that caused the ClickFix bug). (r32933, bug 13624)
- The part of the protection form that deals with move protection is now less confusing to screen-readers. (r32999, bug 11039)
- The syntax <references /> no longer results in an error if no <ref> tags are found, but instead in an empty reference list. (r33003, bug 13653)
- The combination of parameters action=render and diff= now work on image description pages. (r33057, bug 13433)
- Clicking on the 'earliest' link for the history of a page with a large history no longer shows users with the ability to rollback a nonfunctional rollback link for the first entry on that page. (r33190, bug 13705)
- The title of the browser window when viewing Special:Search with no search term entered no longer incorrectly says 'Search results'. (r33192, bug 13708)
- Old redirect pages are now automatically added to the redirect table if they weren't there already when viewed or queried through the API. (This correction makes viewing redirects more efficient, and also corrects some bugs where API queries that automatically resolve redirects caused errors.) (r33133, bug 13651)
- The API parameter cmcontinue (to page through category member queries) now works correctly. (r33256, bug 13718)
- Special:Protectedpages no longer contains an excessively long line that can cause horizontal scrolling in smaller browser windows. (r33267, bug 13738)
- Deleting a user's user page no longer causes the user creation entry to disappear from Recent Changes (this bug did not affect the user creation log). (r33269, bug 13727)
New features
- The API can now filter returned recentchanges data by whether the changes refer to redirects. (r32916, bug 13618)
- The API now allows an old version of a page to be used with action=parse. (r33069, bug 13544)
- A new interface message MediaWiki:Mainpage-description has been added, which allows the link to the Main Page in the sidebar to be given text other than "Main Page". (bugs 6332 and 8617, r33084)
- A new magic word {{PAGESINCATEGORY:category}} is available, counting the number of pages total in a category; it returns 0 on error, and uses of that magic word count towards the same limit as #ifexist: (see related story). (r32932, bug 6943)
- Special:Whatlinkshere can now be filtered to show just redirects, transclusions, or links. (r33163, bug 6934)
- Emails sent via Special:Emailuser now identify the user who sent them. (r33178, bug 13714) (reverted in r33315)
- Indefinitely protected pages can now be filtered out from Special:Protectedpages. (r33238, bug 13722)
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.
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