Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-06-04/Technology report

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The Wikipedia Signpost


Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

By ais523, 4 June 2007

This is a summary of recent technology news for the MediaWiki software and Wikimedia configuration. Note that changes do not necessarily go live immediately; compare the revision number (starting with 'r') on Special:Version with the revision number on this page to see whether a change is live or not.

Fixed bugs

  • It's now impossible for an admin to enter a block summary that's too large to fit into the relevant database field (such summaries were previously truncated). (r22578, bug 10036)
  • The incorrect password attempt is no longer repeated back in the HTML of the login form if a user enters an incorrect password. (r22665, bug 8931)

New features

  • The 'upright' parameter can be given in image markup, which reduces the width of a thumbnail (for use with images that are significantly taller than wide). (r22305, bug 7003)
  • Several changes were made to <math> tags:
    • The \hline notation was whitelisted. (r22477, bug 7899)
    • The rendering of \ker, \hom, \arg, \dim and \approx as HTML was improved. (r22658, bug 3624)
  • Each entry on Special:Whatlinkshere for a page now has an entry to that page's own what-links-here. (r22546, bug 7960)
  • The information about what user, IP, or range was actually blocked can now be shown in the block message (e.g. if a user is caught in a rangeblock, it's possible to distinguish this from their IP being blocked). (r22641, bug 10076)
  • The deletion log for a page name is now shown when creating that page. (r22642, bug 7691)

Other technology news

There were two highly noticeable server problems this week:

  • A bug in some new code confused the English Wikipedia and Commons database servers, messing up replication and causing Special:Contributions to gain an unusually large lag. [1]
  • A fire alarm turned off the air conditioners in one area, causing several machines to overheat. The database was locked (preventing any edits, uploads, registration of new accounts, or just about anything that is saved by the database) and Wikipedia was incredibly slow for a while. [2]

Both problems have since been fixed.

Ongoing news

  • Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla.


Also this week: From the editor — Admin desysopped — BLP, revisited — RFA suspended — GFDL Government photos — WikiWorld — News and notes — Features and admins — Technology — Arbitration