Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

By ais523, 13 October, 2008

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 1.16alpha-wmf(r59858), 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

• <ref/> tags that refer to previous references can now be created with {{#tag:}}. (r41669, bug 15770)
• #iferror: has been improved to catch more sorts of errors. (r41881, bug 15730)
• When a template is removed from a cascade-protected page and the template transcluded a category onto that page, the category is now removed from the page. (r41923, bug 15846)
• The special-pages dropdown is now in the correct place on the Nostalgia skin. (r41940, bug 15928)
• A page's content is no longer silently overwritten if a user has an edit conflict with another user, then an edit conflict with themself when they try to fix it (which could, for instance, happen due to clicking on the 'back' button during the save). (r42034, bug 15991)
• A user no longer overwrites the entire page when trying to edit a section and clicking on 'save' before the edit page is fully loaded. (r42037, bug 1181)
• A large number of SVG-related bugs were fixed by the upgrade of the SVG-rendering code used on the MediaWiki servers; more fonts are now available for SVG as well.

New features

• The "templates used on this page" list at the very bottom of the edit screen now has edit links for those templates which are editable by the user viewing them. (r41829, bug 11904)
• Special:BlockIP now has a link to the contributions of the user who will be blocked. (r41831, bug 15432)
• Images now take their alt text from their alt= parameter, if one is present. (r41837, bug 368)
• Special:RecentChangesLinked can now be transcluded. (r41861, bug 13179)
• Searching Special:IPBlockList now reveals rangeblocks that block a particular IP, as well as blocks directly on that IP. (r41902, bug 14634)

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.

Also this week: Experimental RfA — News and notes — Dispatches — Features and admins — Technology report — Arbitration report
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