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.12 (8b8c762), 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.

• The meta=userinfo query of the API now places <query> tags around the query, the same as with other API queries, when returning results in XML format. (r28867, bug 12413)
• Pages with HTML entities in their name (such as [[&lt;]]) are now invalid titles (such titles didn't work beforehand anyway, and just caused bugs). (r28968, bug 3097)
• A bug causing Special:Makesysop (a bureaucrat-only page) to stop working when Special:Userrights (another bureaucrat-only page that performs the same function, among others) was enabled was fixed. (r29092)

• A new generalised set of code for adding and removing user rights has been adopted. The code is currently set to allow exactly the same user rights changes as before (bureaucrats can make users into administrators, bureaucrats, and/or bots, and remove the bot flag from users; other changes require a steward), but it is now possible to easily fulfil requests for other permission combinations (so that, for instance, administrators could be allowed to grant or remove rollback from users), although such configuration changes still need to be made by a shell user. Bureaucrats can now use Special:Userrights as an alternative method of altering a user's rights (this is the same page that stewards use, but is less functional for bureaucrats). (r28650, bug 11645)

• The Title Blacklist extension was enabled on Wikimedia wikis, allowing the creation of pages matching certain regular expressions to be forbidden by administrators via MediaWiki:Titleblacklist. This is in addition to the protection of nonexistent pages, which should be used instead if only one page title is to be blacklisted.

• 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.

Confirmation of current stewards is complete. Ausir, Romihaitza, Snowdog, and Suisui were not confirmed due to inactivity. Datrio and Fantasy resigned their stewardship voluntarily prior to these discussions.

The Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser continued this week. Seventy-two days into the fundraiser, about 43,300 people have donated at least US$1, and the Foundation has raised about $1,450,000.

Donations this week rose; this may be partially due to the end of the year, where donations traditionally rise as taxpayers seek end-of-year deductions. Donations also were affected by a New Year's Day matching contributions promise; the anonymous donor has offered up to $50,000.

Anonymous donations of $5,000, $2,500, $2,100, $2,000 and JP¥250,000 ($2,183.25), and a $2,250 donation from Francis Hogle led the unusually busy week of donations. Six other large contributions, all of $1,000, were received; four were anonymous, and Michael Webb and Gary Steinmetz each donated $1,000 as well.

Wikimania 2009 bidding continues; one more bid was submitted this week: Buenos Aires. This joins three other official bids: Bogotá, Kathmandu, Nepal, and Toronto. New bids will be open until January 12, at which time the jury will be announced. Bids already created will be open until February 3, when bidding will end, and deliberations will begin. On or before February 20, the host city for Wikimania 2009 will be announced to the public.

• Piotr Konieczny has passed Ghirlandajo as the most prolific did-you-know writer, with 175 articles featured on did you know.
• A new page has been created for soliciting freely-licensed photos of celebrities. The page directs celebrities or their agents to e-mail an OTRS queue, suggesting that the photos be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
• On Tuesday, January 8, editor and administrator Jonathan Hochman will give a lecture ("Wikipedia & Social Media") at the Tumblebrook Country Club in Bloomfield, Connecticut. The event will run from 6:30-9 p.m. The cost is $45 per person; the price includes dinner and cocktails.
• The French Wikipedia has reached 600,000 articles.
• The Portuguese Wikipedia has reached 350,000 articles.
• The Arabic Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
• The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles.
• The Interlingue Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
• The Estonian Wikipedia has reached 100,000 total pages.
• The Limburgish Wiktionary gained 750 articles (about 37% increase) in one day.
• The Nepal Bhasa Wikipedia has reached 40,000 articles.
• The Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
• The Divehi Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
• The Limburgish Wiktionary has reached 1,000 articles.
• The Kannada Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
• The Malayalam Wiktionary has reached 1,000 articles.

The Arbitration Committee opened one new case this week, and closed two cases, leaving four cases currently open.

• RodentofDeath: A case involving alleged personal attacks and policy violations by RodentofDeath on articles including Angeles City. As a result of the case, RodentofDeath was banned for one year, and Susanbryce reminded not to use Wikipedia for purposes of advocacy.

• Episodes and characters: A case involving alleged misconduct with regard to the notability of episodes and characters from television series. As a result of the case, the parties are urged to work collaboratively to seek consensus on the issue.

• IRC: A case involving an alleged personal attack by Tony Sidaway on Bishonen on #wikipedia-en-admins, which led to an edit war on WP:WEA, involving page protection and unprotection by David Gerard, Geogre and others, and a block of Giano II, which was quickly undone.

• John Buscema: A case involving editing of the John Buscema article by editors including Tenebrae and Skyelarke.

• Dbachmann: A case involving alleged misconduct on the part of administrator Dbachmann and editing by other users on several race-related articles. Arbitrator Kirill Lokshin has proposed remedies banning Bakasuprman and Deeceevoice, admonishing Dbachmann not to use administrator tools in editing disputes, and placing Afrocentrism on article probation.

• Matthew Hoffman: A case involving controversial blocks of MatthewHoffman by a vanished user. Various remedies were proposed including either desysopping or admonishing the vanished user and annotating Matthew Hoffman's block log to reflect the arbitrators' view that the blocks were unjustified. A motion has been passed suspending the case for 30 days (until approximately 20 January , 2008) to allow for community input at a request for comment.