Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-05-02/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
- An obscure problem with diffs was finally tracked down and (hopefully) fixed this week; it occasionally caused corrupted output from the diff engine. The problem turned out to be a version mismatch between the executable and operating system on some specific Wikimedia servers. (T11533 and many duplicates; was fixed without changing the code (just the executable), so no version number)
- Some actions now work correctly with respect to some pages whose name starts with / (such as Template:/doc). (r33742, bug 13822)
- The drop-down search suggestion box (enabled this week) now works in non-Monobook-based skins. (r33759, bug 13824)
New features
- A range of new mathematical functions was added to {{#expr:}}: sin, cos, tan, asin, acos, atan, exp, ln, abs, floor, trunc, ceil, ^. The constants pi and e were also added. (r33780, bug 13216)
- The API now accepts prop=categoryinfo queries, which queries information such as a category's size. (r33914, bug 13735)
- A warning is now given when uploading an image with the same name as an image on Commons. (r33972, bug 889)
Configuration changes
- Some HTTP cookies are now marked HTTPOnly; this reduces the effects that certain types of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities (if any exist) would have if they were exploited.
- The search box now suggests search terms. (There is an option to turn this behaviour off; see the 'Search' tab of Special:Preferences.)
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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