Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Please note that 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.12 (94ed029), 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

3 bots or bot tasks were approved for operation this week. These were:

• MadmanBot 7: To perform page moves for English football competition seasons articles.
• Erwin85Bot 8: To notify article creators and major contributors when an article is nominated for deletion.
• J Milburn Bot 3: To remove the Fungus stubs category from pages.

Bug fixes

• Special:Export no longer exports duplicate copies of pages. ( r53521, bug 17374)
• The autogenerated <meta keywords> tag that appeared in the HTML header of pages has been removed, as the tag was not useful and is usually ignored by search engines. ( r53482, bug 19761)

New features

• A new external authentication framework has been added to MediaWiki. This is intended for external, third-party installations of MediaWiki, where it's necessary to streamline authentication with other existing systems. ( r53497)
• A new global variable hook has been added that provides information about third-party software used, such as if ImageMagick or another graphics software is being used. ( r53398, bug 14611)

Other news

• A new branch has been added to the MediaWiki SVN repository that contains the version of MediaWiki and extension code that is currently running on English Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
• An off-site archive is being added to serve as a backup for images and media files on Wikimedia Commons, as well as to store XML snapshots of Wikimedia projects. [1]
• The .xhtml and .xht extensions have been added to the blacklist for file uploads. ( r53487, bug 19355)

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27 July 2009

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"Current" software version

The boilerplate for the technology report states "the English Wikipedia is currently running version {{CURRENTVERSION}}, and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active". With the advent of the wmf-deployment branch, that's really no longer helpful. For example, at the moment it says we're running r53856, but most changes to trunk since r52088 have not been merged to wmf-deployment and so are unavailable despite them having lower revision numbers. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to reword it to be more accurate. Anomie ⚔ 12:13, 28 July 2009 (UTC) reply