Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-01-29/Technology report

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Page protection can now be set with expiry dates. Preexisting protections, or protections made with the field left blank, will be indefinite. (Andrew Garrett, bug 4133, r19567; fixes by Brion Vibber in r19595, r19597)

A new special page, Special:Protectedpages, shows a list of all protected and semiprotected pages on the wiki. As with many special pages, its results are cached, and they have not been generated for Wikimedia wikis as of the time of this writing. (Andrew Garrett, r19561)

Page patrolling is now logged for wikis with this feature enabled. An example can be seen in action here. (Rob Church, bug 8621, r19341)

It is now possible to search for deleted pages beginning with a particular string of characters on Special:Undelete. (Brion Vibber, r19365)

It is now possible for wikis to require a certain number of edits, as well as a certain registration time period, for users to become autoconfirmed. Thus, for instance, accounts that have existed for several weeks but have made fewer than five edits might be prevented from moving pages or so on. If a particular wiki would like this enabled for them, it can file a bug report after community agreement. (Andrew Garrett, bug 8391, r19376)

A new JavaScript variable, wgUserGroups, contains an array of the user's groups, which can be used (for instance) for displaying certain added elements only to sysops. (Carl Fürstenberg, bug 8712, r19524 and r19611)

MediaWiki:Uploadtext can now access the name of the image to be saved, as $1. This allows links to Commons, for instance, to prefill the name field, via links such as [http://commons.wikimedia.org/{{#if:$1|w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=$1|wiki/Special:Upload}} Upload to the Wikimedia Commons instead!]. (Rob Church, bug 8671, r19527)

Cascading protection no longer applies to user CSS or JS subpages. This fixes an issue that prevented at least one bot from operating. (Andrew Garrett, r19549)

A few interface changes were made:

Some bugs were fixed:

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.