Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-02-04/Technology report

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Wikipedia Signpost


Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

By ais523, 4 February 2008

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 1.13alpha (r36185), 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

  • Some interface bugs were fixed in the new 'Modern' skin, where certain elements (such as the new-messages bar and footer) were incorrectly styled, meaning that they were either the wrong colour or in the wrong position. (bugs 12876, 12863 and 12894; r30455 and r30490)
  • Some invalid HTML in the deletion-confirm screen has been fixed. (r30458, bug 12887)

New features

  • There is a new magic word {{ROOTPAGENAME}} (and an escaped version {{ROOTPAGENAMEE}}) that returns the name of the non-subpage page that the current page is a subpage (directly or indirectly) of; for instance, the ROOTPAGENAME of Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-02-04/Technology report is Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost. (r30413, bug 12872, later reverted in r30547)
  • A prop=imageinfo query in the API now returns a query-continue the same way that other API queries do. (r30483, bug 12875)

Other technology news

  • The removal of the query.php API is being considered; it is recommended that bots and scripts that use it switch to the newer api.php API.
  • It has now been made technically impossible for administrators to delete or move the Main Page. (Note that the technical block prevents the deletion-confirmation screen appearing; if the confirmation screen does appear for a deletion, then it means that the deletion is possible and should therefore probably not be attempted.) This follows on from two recent deletions of the Main Page; the first was as a result of an administrator having been told that the deletion was impossible and trying it for himself (ANI report), and the second to history-merge a lot of dummy revisions onto the Main Page in an attempt to push it over the large-history deletion limit (AN report); note that developers have since requested that this not be done on any page. The history of the Main Page has since been restored.

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:

2007 in review — Newsroom use — WikiWorld — News and notes — In the news — Tutorial — Dispatches — Features and admins — Technology report — Arbitration report
(← Previous Technology report) Signpost archives (Next Technology report→)