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.
Fixed bugs
Some minor HTML errors in the produced HTML during an edit conflict have been fixed. (r29474, bug 12553)
section=0 now returns just section 0 when used with action=raw, rather than the entire page. (r29476, bug 12505)
The definition of a category timestamp (not normally visible to users, but available via the API and used by some scripts, and on some other projects) has changed; the category timestamp for a page now never changes when the page is renamed (previously it did only if the category was included without an explicit sortkey). (r29615, bug 12584)
The dropdown box for selecting a namespace on Special:Newpages now reflects the true setting of the namespace filter when the page is loaded; previously it sometimes incorrectly displayed that all namespaces were included even though the filter was set to the article namespace only. (r29618, bug 12588)
When a bot creates a page, that edit now again doesn't appear in Recent Changes by default. (This behaviour used to be the case, but was accidentally broken and fixed again.) (r29699, bug 12611)
It's now possible for a bot-flagged user to make an edit that isn't bot-flagged, by appending &bot=0 to the end of the relevant URL. (r29539, bug 12574)
It was also realised this week that at some point it became possible to write universal interwiki prefixes; that is, an interwiki prefix that works no matter which Wikimedia wiki the prefix is rendered on. The link should be written [[m:project:language:page name]] (e.g. m:w:en:WP:POST); this routes the parsing of the links via Meta, thus making them universally correct. (bug 4285)
Configuration changes
The user rights framework configuration was changed for the English Wikipedia this week, allowing administrators to cause users to become 'rollbackers' or to remove that right (see related story). A rollbacker can perform rollback in much the same way that an administrator can, except that if the rollbacker is not also a bot the rate at which rollbacks may be done is limited (to 5 per minute, or 5 per 2 minutes if rollback is for some reason granted to a non-autoconfirmed user). (bug 12534)
Other technology news
A report on some of this week's site operations is available; there was a performance review of the software. This made several changes, especially to the way that caching works; also, the Title Blacklist extension (controlled via MediaWiki:Titleblacklist) was disabled pending a performance improvement, and the 'refresh' button on the browser is now similar to action=purge in fewer situations than before. There were other related miscellaneous changes such as changing MediaWiki:Pagecategories from the default {{PLURAL:$1|Category|Categories}} to just Categories; on a wiki as large as the English Wikipedia, and for a message that needs to appear on most pages, this actually makes a significant difference.
Four new Wikimedia wikis have been created this week:
Wikipedia locked up for about 10 minutes on 11 January due to the rename of User:Warlordjohncarter (who has a server edit count of over 76000) to User:John Carter; the servers take some time to process a rename of that size.
Ongoing news
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.
The Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser ended on Tuesday, January 8. At the end of the fundraiser, about 44,600 people had donated at least US$1, and the Foundation has raised nearly $1,500,000. In addition, Erik Möller announced a record $500,000 unrestricted donation, received from an anonymous donor, which along with offline donations brought the fundraiser's total just over $2 million.
Dragons flight (Robert A. Rohde) prepared a series of graphs analyzing this fundraiser as compared to previous fundraisers.
Scott Laws, username Dalf, died of colon cancer on 14 September, 2007. He had been a long-term Wikipedian, editing since before 2005 and accumulating over 3,000 edits. Among the articles he edited were Imperial Japanese Navy, Horcrux, and Nuclear power. Laws was an alumnus of Hickman High School and the University of Missouri; he worked for Microsoft's Hotmail in Silicon Valley until he was diagnosed with cancer in 2004. He was 30 years old.
The Commons Picture of the Year competition for 2007 is now open. Any Wikimedian with more than 200 edits is eligible to vote. There are two rounds of voting (round 1 is Jan 10-17, the final is 20-24 Jan). Information about the voting method and how to get a voting token is at Commons:Picture of the Year/2007/Voting. (Voting is being conducted on custom software on the toolserver written by User:Bryan.)
In discussion is a new speedy deletion criterion. CSD T3 ("Templates that are not employed in any useful fashion, and are either substantial duplications of another template, or hardcoded instances of another template where the same functionality could be provided by that other template, may be deleted after being tagged for seven days.") is under discussion on the CSD talk page.
The Arbitration Committee opened four new cases this week, and closed five cases, leaving seven currently open.
Closed cases
Dbachmann: A case involving alleged misconduct on the part of administrator Dbachmann and editing by other users on several race-related articles. As a result of the case, Dbachmann was "reminded" not to use administrator tools in editing disputes, and the articles Afrocentrism and Race of ancient Egyptians were placed on article probation.
Zeraeph: A case involving alleged misconduct by Zeraeph. As a result of the case, Zeraeph was banned for one year.
John Gohde 2: A case involving alleged misconduct by John Gohde, which he denied. As a result of the case, Gohde was banned for one year.
Jim62sch: A case involving alleged off-wiki harrasment by Jim62sch, possibly involving reporting of potential on-wiki violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. As a result of the case, Jim62sch was instructed to "refrain from making any comments to another user that could reasonably be construed as harassing, threatening, or bullying".
John Buscema: A case involving editing of the John Buscema article by editors including Tenebrae and Skyelarke. As a result of the case, both editors were banned from editing that article for three months.
New cases
Waterboarding: A case involving a dispute between a large number of editors on Waterboarding, relating to the question as to whether the technique should be described as torture.
Bluemarine: A case involving alleged civility and COI violations by User:Bluemarine on Matt Sanchez, the article on himself, which has also been edited tendentiously (from a hostile point of view) by a number of other editors, many of whom have been blocked.
R. fiend: A case involving a controversial block of Ed Poor by R. fiend. The case has been suspended, since R. fiend has expressed his intention to resign adminship.
Evidence phase
Highways 2: A case involving editing by NE2 on articles relating to WikiProject U.S. Roads, allegedly against consensus of other editors involved with that wikiproject.
Voting phase
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. Various findings of fact have been proposed relating to the editors in dispute, but no remedies have yet been proposed by arbitrators.
Suspended by motion
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.
