Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-01-29/Technology report

Page protection can now be set with expiry dates. Preexisting protections, or protections made with the field left blank, will be indefinite. (Andrew Garrett, bug 4133, r19567; fixes by Brion Vibber in r19595, r19597)

A new special page, Special:Protectedpages, shows a list of all protected and semiprotected pages on the wiki. As with many special pages, its results are cached, and they have not been generated for Wikimedia wikis as of the time of this writing. (Andrew Garrett, r19561)

Page patrolling is now logged for wikis with this feature enabled. An example can be seen in action here. (Rob Church, bug 8621, r19341)

It is now possible to search for deleted pages beginning with a particular string of characters on Special:Undelete. (Brion Vibber, r19365)

It is now possible for wikis to require a certain number of edits, as well as a certain registration time period, for users to become autoconfirmed. Thus, for instance, accounts that have existed for several weeks but have made fewer than five edits might be prevented from moving pages or so on. If a particular wiki would like this enabled for them, it can file a bug report after community agreement. (Andrew Garrett, bug 8391, r19376)

A new JavaScript variable, wgUserGroups, contains an array of the user's groups, which can be used (for instance) for displaying certain added elements only to sysops. (Carl Fürstenberg, bug 8712, r19524 and r19611)

MediaWiki:Uploadtext can now access the name of the image to be saved, as $1. This allows links to Commons, for instance, to prefill the name field, via links such as [http://commons.wikimedia.org/{{#if:$1|w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=$1|wiki/Special:Upload}} Upload to the Wikimedia Commons instead!]. (Rob Church, bug 8671, r19527)

Cascading protection no longer applies to user CSS or JS subpages. This fixes an issue that prevented at least one bot from operating. (Andrew Garrett, r19549)

A few interface changes were made:

• On Special:Allpages, the "previous" link no longer appears on the first page. (Brion Vibber, bug 8777, r19663)
• Sysops creating a new interface page will now be shown MediaWiki:Editinginterface, just as they are when editing existing ones. (Rob Church, bug 8715, r19519)
• When using oversight, users can now choose to view diffs of oversighted revisions, in addition to the revision text itself. (Voice of All, bug 8131, r19543)

Some bugs were fixed:

• A bug that prevented previewing of deleted revisions was fixed. (Rob Church, bug 8676, r19395)
• It is now possible to link from one page to another with a numerically equal name (like from 00 to 0 or vice versa). (Rob Church, bug 8678, r19397)
• Usernames with spaces will now work correctly with built-in unblock links. (Rob Church, bug 8688, r19449)
• Blocking a user when the database is read-only (such as when the site is shut down for maintenance) now informs the admin of the problem rather than silently failing. (Rob Church, bug 8701, r19479)
• Exceptions to the bad image list will now correctly show up in galleries. (Rob Church, bug 8403, r19536)
• The correct accesskey combination (Shift-Alt-) is now given for users of Mozilla Firefox on X11 systems. (Brion Vibber, bug 8719, r19587)
• The software no longer crashes when the user attempts to view the image page for a malformed multipage Djvu file. (Brion Vibber, bug 8652, r19668)

Some updates were made to non-English messages, specifically:

• Dutch (thanks to Siebrand)
• Emiliano-Romagnolo (thanks to Ottaviano)
• Finnish (thanks to Niklas Laxström)
• French (thanks to Bertrand Grondin and Rémi Kaupp)
• German (thanks to Raymond and Leon Weber)
• Greek (thanks to Kostas Stampoulis)
• Hebrew (thanks to Rotem Liss)
• Indonesian (thanks to Ivan Lanin)
• Italian (thanks to BrokenArrow and AnyFile)
• Japanese (thanks to kaikkd)
• Kazakh (thanks to AlefZet)
• Korean (thanks to klutzy)
• Marathi (thanks to wces423)
• Ripuarian (thanks to Caesius noh en Idee vum Manes and Raymond)
• Slovak (thanks to helix84)
• Swedish (thanks to Lejonel)

Internationalization help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to Mediazilla.