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On Saturday, July 20, 2002, Wikipedia moved to a new high-capacity server and new, hopefully more efficient, software base. The new software was designed to look and behave as similarly to the previous phase II software as possible, but a few new features and changes should be noted:
- A whole new system for uploading and using images to illustrate your articles.
- Search function now indexes 2- and 3-letter words.
- New side-by-side diffs of article changes.
- "Floating" sidebar option for some modern web browsers.
- A few minor changes to wikitext syntax (see wikipedia:How does one edit a page)
- Since anonymous users, while not having user pages, still have user contributions pages, their IP numbers in lists like Recentchanges and article histories link to their contributions.
- Support for maths formulae using Wikipedia:TeX markup
- Better support for auto-posting "bots"
- A new static page caching system has greatly reduced system load
- The database server and the page server now run on separate machines
The Phase III software is robust, and under active development. Many more features have been, and are expected to be, added to the Phase III software, together with bug fixes and improvements in stability. You are encouraged to submit bug reports.
See also Wikipedia:Software Phase IV for speculation on the nature of the next phase in development, and also the wikitech-l mailing list.
See also Wikipedia:MediaWiki.