Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-12-26/Technology report

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Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

By Simetrical, December 26, 2006

On wikis with edit patrolling enabled, users who are able to patrol their own edits now have all their edits marked patrolled. (Rob Church, bug 5411,r18435) After some consternation at certain wikis (especially the Dutch Wikipedia) that allowed all autoconfirmed users — those with accounts more than four days old — to patrol edits, the ability to patrol one's own edits was separated from the ability to patrol others' edits, so it is now possible to only be allowed to patrol others' edits. (Rob Church, r18496)

A new extension, Duplicator, was checked into Subversion. If enabled, it will allow pages to be duplicated, including all history, for purposes such as splitting up articles while preserving contribution history. However, only articles with a limited number of revisions (250 by default) can be duplicated. The extension has not yet been enabled on any wikis. (Rob Church, r18453)

Another new extension, Contributors, was also checked into Subversion. If enabled, it will generate a list of significant contributors to a particular article. The list can be accessed directly or {{included}} in other pages. Some functionality exists for this in the main MediaWiki software, but it is disabled on Wikipedia due to its inefficiency. The extension has not yet been enabled on any wikis. (Rob Church, r18510)

A bug in Safari and other WebKit-based browsers will now be avoided. The bug caused errors to occur in the recently-added "redirect to section" functionality (see archived story), but is fixed in the latest versions of WebKit. Affected browsers will now simply not jump to the correct section. (Brion Vibber, r18459)

The new recent changes counter will now count the length of added substituted templates, signatures, and similar constructions correctly. Previously it would count, for instance, ~~~~ as four characters, when actually many more were inserted. (Rob Church, bug 8329, r18463)

Image captions ending with px now work. Previously they were interpreted as an image width, even if an image width had been previously declared and even if the caption made no sense as an image width (e.g., The IATA code for Air Niugini is PX would be interpreted the same as a width of 0 pixels). (Ashar Voultoiz, bug 8335, r18465)

Page names can now no longer include Unicode right-to-left or left-to-right marks, invisible control characters that ensure that left-to-right text can be correctly mixed with right-to-left text such as Hebrew or Arabic. A left-to-right mark is appended to the end of article titles on pages such as Special:Recentchanges to ensure that titles containing right-to-left characters do not display oddly. This was causing problems, because it was easy to copy and paste the title including the invisible mark, rendering it nonfunctional. Now the mark should be ignored, hopefully reducing confusion. (Brion Vibber, bug 3696, r18513)

The "undo" button on the most recent revision now works. Due to a bug in the code, it originally filled the edit box with the current revision's text, not the previous one's. (Brion Vibber, bug 8351, r18546)

CheckUser now has a "reason" field, and it is now possible to check for recent edits by 17-23 CIDR IP address as well as to check for the IP address used recently by a user. (User:Voice of All, bug 5044, r18552)

Several improvements were made to the functioning of language variants, for wikis such as Serbian and Chinese that use more than one script. (Rainman, r18593)

Several interface changes were made:

Some updates were made to non-English messages, specifically:

Internationalization help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to Mediazilla.


Also this week: — Arbitrators selected — Wikipedia and academia — WikiWorld — News and notes — Press coverage — Features and admins — Technology — Arbitration