Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that some changes described here have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.43.0-wmf.14 (fb46c87), 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.

This past week, the developers rolled out an update of MediaWiki to r47457. A number of new features and bug fixes are now live. [1]

• If an admin resubmits a block request without changing the block settings, a new block log entry will now not be added if the block settings are actually not changed. (r47604, bug 16436)
• Special pages that are updated using the updateSpecialPages.php script as a cron job were not working since early February. The code has been fixed and the scripts were manually run on the small wikis to make sure things have been fixed properly. (bug 17534)
• When moving a page over a redirect, the redirect from the old title to the new page was not working. This problem has been resolved. (r46424, bug 17300)

• The __NONEWSECTIONLINK__ magic word has been added so that the new section link can be hidden on a page-by-page basis. (r47522, bug 16335)

• The Wikimedia servers were down from 00:50 to 01:50 UTC on February 21, due to a failed fileserver which triggered additional failures. Changes have since been made so that the servers are not as dependent on the fileservers. [2]
• A new gateway for mobile users of Wikipedia has been launched and is in testing. Some JavaScript code has been added to the English Wikipedia, to allow browser detection for users on an iPhone, iPod Touch, or Android-based device, giving them the link to the new mobile site. The interface on the new mobile site has been cleaned up substantially, with sections that can be expanded and collapsed. [3]
• The AbuseFilter extension is now enabled on mediawiki.org, allowing wider testing of the extension.

• 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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23 February 2009 (all comments)

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