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Technology report

Left with no choice

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By Edokter

Software evolution does not always mean that features are being added. It also means that old fat is being trimmed. It is no different for MediaWiki. A while ago, developers started discussing about removing some user preferences to reduce "option bloat" (see also Bugzilla:52807). Last week, the advanced options dealing with page presentation (such as how to format links to non-existent pages, and whether to justify paragraphs) were removed, and it did not go unnoticed, but discussion did not grow to VisualEditor-esque proportions.

In brief

Highlights from Tech news:

  • Recent software changes
    • The Vector search box was changed to fix old display and accessibility issues; for example, you can now use full-text search even if you have disabled JavaScript. Please report any problems you see. The option to disable the "simplified search bar" on Vector will also be removed. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
    • You are now notified when someone adds a link to your user page on wikis where it didn't work before (wikis with dates in the year-month-day order, including Hungarian, Japanese, Korean and some variants of Chinese). [6]
  • VisualEditor news
    • You can now set media items' alt text and position, and directly set their size, in the media tool. [7] [8]
    • The gallery tool was improved and several issues were fixed. [9] [10] [11]
  • Problems
    • On 3 February, all wikis were broken for about an hour due to a traffic balancing issue. [12]
    • On 6 February, some wikis were broken for about half an hour in total due to a problem with the Math extension (Editor note: it actually lasted two days, and only affected math rendered in PNG format.).
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  • The Math extension outage (which Tech News refers to as "wikis being broken" due to the simple language used for that multilingual newsletter) only lasted about 30 minutes. What lasted 2 days was Math rendering issues, not the actual outage. guillom 08:29, 13 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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