Over time, a large number of extensions (over 1500) have been written for the MediaWiki software on which Wikimedia wikis and other sites are based. A small percentage of these (approximately 80, in fact) are enabled on Wikimedia wikis. Today's What is? section looks at Semantic MediaWiki (official site), a package of extensions that are not currently enabled on Wikimedia wikis.

Semantic MediaWiki (shortened to SMW) allows those writing an article to use tags like "[[Has population::82,060,000]]" to allow automated tools to understand the answers to these sort of questions. In practical terms, many such tags would be included in infoboxes. Once it's there, a new breed of maps, calendars and graphs can be generated from it, and the data can also be passed on to third party users easily and in a machine-readable format.

Several hundred wikis do use the software, however, and there have long been calls to deploy it to at least some of the Foundation's wikis. Several SMW developers were invited to give presentations at the WMF's "Data Summit" in February (Signpost coverage). Though developers at the WMF are not yet satisfied that SMW can scale to meet the demands of the many millions of users Wikipedia and other WMF wikis get (Deputy Director Erik Möller recently called it "still a big heap of 'untrusted code' ... that we're not prepared to host on our main cluster yet"), many will undoubtedly be interested to see how SMW adoption progresses over time.

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

• Wikimedia wikis have a new 404 error page (view template, bug #17316).
• Wikimedia sites experienced an unusually high level of server errors from April 19 onwards which system administrator Ryan Lane blamed on "upgrading too many" Squid caching servers at the same time (wikitech-l mailing list). As a result, several servers were temporarily downgraded again (server admin log).
• The addition of new sections to a page can no longer be marked as a "Minor" edit (bug #27860).
• The independent website translatewiki.net, which handles the translation of the MediaWiki interface (see previous Signpost coverage for context), is celebrating its sixth birthday (Niklas Laxström).
• As of 19 April a new developer, Patrick Reilly, has been hired to rewrite the mobile site, m.wikipedia.org. The fundamental problems with the site were highlighted in a post this week to the wikitech-l mailing list.
• Including a non-existent file will now trigger addition to a tracking category, in a similar way to existing cite-errors (bug #23816).
• Wikis can enable account resetting by entering solely an email address in the event of a user forgetting their username, though a decision has not been taken on whether this will be enabled on WMF wikis due to performance concerns (bug #13015). In addition, for all wikis, registered users' IP addresses will not be sent in the password reset emails (bug #18347).

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• SMW sounds exciting. I can foresee Wikipedia being twice as useful in the future. There's still so much room for expansion yet to come, providing future as well as existing editors with new opportunities to improve Wikipedia. -- œ^™ 01:55, 26 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • It is very useful (using it to reduce duplication of information is an obvious application, but barely even begins to scratch the surface - you really start to appreciate what can be done with it when you start using it to check page names and the like), but there's also a lot of room for improvement, in my experience at least. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 04:18, 26 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • It would be a free alternative to Wolfram Alpha and it would solve the problems with categories, page titles etc. --Chricho ∀ (talk) 12:22, 28 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• The 404 error bug seems to have the wrong number. I couldn't find the correct one. Someone please fix that. --Waldir ^talk 12:39, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Fixed. Sorry. - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 18:00, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]