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 1.44.0-wmf.8 (f08e6b3), 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.
action=edit in the API no longer allows creating invalid titles that look like interwiki titles. (r58649, bug 20967)
New features
The Global usage extension has been enabled on Wikimedia Commons, to show where files are being used across multiple language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects.
The $wgUseInstantCommons setting has been added to allow easy enabling of Commons as a remote image repository for 3rd party wikis. (r58652)
The ability to protect files without protecting the file (image description) pages has been added. (r58537, bug 6579)
Other news
Wikipedia was down for approximately 15 minutes on November 16, when a software update was being pushed live that caused a memcache failure and database overload. [1]
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