Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-06-02/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.8 (f08e6b3), 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

Many bugs in Single User Login were fixed this week:
- It is now impossible to create an account that has the same name as a global account (this was always meant to be impossible, but previously could happen from time to time). (r35340, bug 14248)
- Only confirmed email addresses are now used to unify accounts into a global account. (r32091, bug 12098)
- Account autocreations (that is, when a user with a global account visits a Wikimedia wiki they haven't formerly visited, thus causing a local account to be created for them on that wiki) now do not show in Special:Recentchanges (although they still show in Special:Log). (r35441, bug 14299)
- When not previously logged in on any wiki, a global account can now correctly log in on a wiki which that user had never visited previously, rather than getting a bad-CAPTCHA error message. (r35506, bug 14317)
- Logging out now logs a global user out from all the Wikimedia wikis involved in the automatic cross-wiki login. (r35533, bug 14301)
- Accounts on deleted wikis no longer interfere with Special:MergeAccount. (bug 14300)
The &assert= parameter now works on the API, as well as for normal edits. (r35472, bug 12038)
A (nonfunctional) rollback link no longer appears for non-admin rollbackers on protected pages. (r35571, bug 14155)
Special:FileDuplicateSearch now correctly links to images, rather than sometimes confusing an image on the English Wikipedia with an image with the same name on Commons. (r35576, bug 14147)
Pressing Return on Special:Renameuser now does the rename rather than opening the user's block log. (r35625, bug 14344)
<gallery> tags can now handle links to images containing URL-encoded special characters. (r35683, bug 11659)

New features

Logging in now logs a user in on all wikis (rather than all wikis on the same domain) if that user has a single-user-login global account (except non-Wikimedia wikis and some wikis on .wikimedia.org).
'Related changes' (since April 2008) can show either recent changes to pages linked from a given page (the default, and old behaviour) or recent changes to pages linked to a given page (i.e. across a page's what-links-here). (bug 6528)
When rolling back an edit, the screen that appears to let a user know that the rollback has happened now shows the diff of what the rollback did. (r35688, bug 14263)

Configuration changes

A new extension (TorBlock) has been installed, to regulate edits of Wikipedia through Tor. Edits from unregistered users via Tor exit nodes are now blocked; and editors who are logged in via Tor do not count as autoconfirmed (allowing page moves, etc.) for 90 days and until they have at least 100 edits.

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.


Also this week: Board elections WikiWorld In the news Dispatches Features and admins Technology report Arbitration report

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