This is a summary of recent (as in, since the last technology report was written) 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.

• Upload warnings about changing spaces to underscores in file names have been removed. (r45676, bug 16968)
• RSS feeds now use the logo designed by the Mozilla Foundation. (r46058, bug 3043)

• Rollback links have been added to Special:RecentChanges. (r45918, bug 9305)
• An option has been added to user preferences to hide patrolled pages from the new page list. (r45857, bug 16957)

• A new server, donated by Sun Microsystems, has been installed at the Tampa facility for the toolserver. It will initially serve as a cache for WikiMiniAtlas, making the tool faster for users in North America, and may eventually be used to take additional load off of toolserver machines in Amsterdam.

• 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.

In addition to the Chief Program Officer and positions for the Stanton Usability initiative (which include two software developers and an interaction developer), the Wikimedia Foundation is also hiring a System Administrator. This position will work out of the San Francisco office. For more, see the job openings page on the Foundation wiki.

Two local Wikimedia Chapters were approved in January: Wikimedia New York City and Wikimedia UK. Wikimedia New York City is the first local chapter in the United States, and serves the Northeastern United States. Wikimedia UK serves the United Kingdom; it is being reconstituted. With these two chapters, Wikimedia Australia no longer has the sole claim to chapter representation of English Wikipedia and other English-language Wikimedia projects.

Two Wikipedia contributors, Thomas Larsen and Richard Austin, recently announced the public launch of a new encyclopedia project called Epistemia on the WikiEN-L mailing list. The project, which can be found at epistemia.org, is a wiki-based encyclopedia that, according to Larsen, aims to provide an alternative to "the negativity of the participatory culture that has developed on Wikipedia" and "the lack of consistent adherence to the conventional quality expectations associated with professional scholarship" on Wikipedia. Although these goals are similar to Citizendium's aims, Larsen stated that they hoped to run the project without implementing Citizendium's "overly-restrictive mechanisms". The new project is licensed under the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.

The French National Order of Merit has been awarded by President Sarkozy of France to Anthere (Florence Devouard). She received the rank of knight as "chair of an international foundation" (the Wikimedia Foundation). You can read more at Devouard, knight in the French National Order of Merit.

Estonian Wikipedian Andres Luure was one of fifteen individuals recognized for volunteering in Estonia for 2008. Country-wide volunteers of the year have been chosen in Estonia since 2005. Out of sixty nominees for the 2008 award, a committee consisting of representatives of media, the public sector, and others chose fifteen volunteers to be rewarded. Luure was recognized for his contributions to Wikipedia. Andres has been active in the Estonian Wikipedia since March 2003; he has the top edit count on the project. Estonian Television carried a live broadcast of the ceremony on December 7, 2008, with President of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves in attendance.

• There is currently a survey about whether to increase the protection level of Biographies of Living People (BLP)s. This would affect a large number of articles: as of January 17, Category:Living people passed 333,333 articles (300,000 were reached on September 7, 2008).
• The 2009 Steward elections and reconfirmation will begin on Meta on February 1. Candidates may nominate themselves until January 25.
• According to the Wikipedia article traffic statistics page, the article on Barack Obama received almost a million page views on January 20, the day of his inauguration.
• Milestones:

• Lithuanian Wiktionary has reached 100,000 articles.
• The Egyptian Arabic (Masry) Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
• The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 22,000 articles.
• The Wikipedia of Ripuarian languages has reached 2,000 users with automatically created global user User:Kaio-ken x10.
• The Piemontèis Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.

The Arbitration Committee has released their near-term agenda. Key points include: opening, per their ruling in this case, a Requests for Comment on Arbitration Enforcement (which has since been opened here); appointing new Checkuser and Oversight operators, under a new system to be created pursuant to reactions to this page; formalizing case acceptance and recusal standards; and establishing a system for emergency removal of user rights, along with an Arbitrator recall system. They also announced a new mailing list structure, as detailed here.

The Arbitration Committee closed no cases this week, and opened one, leaving a total of five cases open.

• Ayn Rand: A case about editorial behavior, such as alleged POV-pushing and bad faith, in relation to the Ayn Rand article. The Arbitration Committee accepted the case as they found that all other avenues of dispute resolution had failed to resolve the dispute.

• Date delinking: A case regarding the behavior of editors in the ongoing dispute relating to policy on linking dates in articles. An injunction has been issued prohibiting large-scale linking or delinking of dates until the case is resolved.

• Scientology: A case regarding behavioral problems in Scientology-related articles; the case is related to the prior case Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/COFS.

• PHG: A case brought by PHG, in a follow up to a prior case against PHG, Franco-Mongol alliance. This case will review PHG's editing since the prior case, and may impose new sanctions, or repeal current sanctions, as necessary.

• Fringe science: A case initially filed about the behavior of ScienceApologist, but opened to look at editing in the entire area of fringe science, and the behavior of editors who are involved in the area of dispute. In a proposed decision now being voted on by arbitrators, Coren has proposed the creation of a new type of arbitration remedy, "supervised editing", which an editor may be placed under when he or she does not "engage other editors or the editorial process appropriately". A designated supervisor would be permitted to revert or refactor the edits of the other editor at his or her discretion, ban the editor from articles, or require that the editor propose any substantial content edits to the supervisor, who will make the edits on his behalf. After the period of supervision terminates, the supervisor will submit a report to the committee who will revise the remedy that placed the editor under supervision. Other remedies include placing ScienceApologist under said supervision, restricting Martinphi from editing policy and guideline pages, admonishing Pcarbonn, and issuing general warnings to behave and seek mediation. Arbitrator voting is in progress.