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 1.44.0-wmf.4 (a8dd895), 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.

For a general review of developer activity over the past year, Midom has put together a report on the state of technology at the Wikimedia Foundation.

• The title blacklist (MediaWiki:Titleblacklist) now correctly handles underscore characters. (r29200, bug 12483)
• Special:Userrights is now listed correctly on Special:Specialpages. (r29245, bug 12489)

• Administrators are now given a warning when creating a page whose title has been protected (by the new feature that allows nonexistent pages to be protected). (r29187, bug 12486)
• The cursor is now focused in the search box by default on Special:Search. (It isn't focused on other pages, because that would make it impossible to use the up and down arrow keys to scroll the page.) (r29202, bug 9939)
• The #titleparts: parser function now allows a greater range of syntax, including negative numbers and numbers greater than the expected range; for instance, "{{#titleparts:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-01-07/Technology report|1|-2}}" returns "2008-01-07", because a negative number now counts from the right. (r28708, bug 12356)

• Although it does not affect the English Wikipedia, there was a major project-wide change this week, which limited page moves to autoconfirmed users on all public Wikimedia wikis. (The change does not affect the English Wikipedia because this limit was already in place.) The change was an attempt to combat page-move vandalism that was affecting many of the smaller wikis; see meta:Metapub/Archives/2007-11#set pagemoves to autoconfirmed - please read and comment for more information about how the decision was made. (bug 12071)

• 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.