Technology report
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.43.0-wmf.10 (093754a), 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.
Bots approved
Four bot tasks were approved this past week:
- FritzpollBot (task 3) — generate reports of articles that don't exist on en-wiki, but exist on other wikis (found by scanning categories).
- FritzpollBot (task 4) — generate a report of biography-related AfDs sorted by listing time.
- WebCiteBOT (operated by ThaddeusB) — add archive links to all pages that point to a specific website.
- LawBot (operated by MZMcBride) — replacing "prettytable" with "wikitable" class used in infoboxes and templates.
Bug fixes
- An internal file caching bug has been fixed. The bug was preventing access to redirects on Commons from other wikis. (r57434, bug 21026)
New features
- A new gadget has been added to Wikimedia Commons to allow users to try the new ogg player, the add media wizard, and firefogg uploading support. [1]
- $wgCapitalLinks is now a per-namespace setting. (r57558, bug 13750)
Other news
- Improvements are being implemented to the Wikimedia Mobile site, including adding NetFront support. The subcategory expansion has been improved so to allow expanding the section by just clicking on the title of the section, rather than needing to click on the "show" button. The mobile site also now supports more languages. [2]
- The Wikimedia Foundation has posted a new job opening, seeking a Code Maintenance Engineer to "review and resolve bug reports, enhancement requests, code changes and extensions" and "to implement systematic testing procedures". The opening closes on October 23, 2009. [3]
- Before his departure, Wikimedia Chief Technical Officer Brion Vibber reviewed the list of commit access requests and approved Kipcool (OmegaWiki) and Xqt (pywikipedia) as new committers. [4]
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