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Since the last edition of the technology report, there have been a number of noteworthy changes to software and server configuration. Most significantly, the AntiSpoof extension (written by Neil Harris in Python and translated to PHP by Brion Vibber) has been enabled on all Wikimedia sites. It is now impossible to register usernames that are too similar to ones already registered on the wiki. Due to concerns that the restrictions were too harsh, they were relaxed less than a day before press time, and discussion is ongoing on the mailing list as to what changes exactly should be made to the code to strike the right balance between false positives and false negatives.
Nick Jenkins, Simetrical, Evan Prodromou, Andrew Garrett, and Jason Richey have become developers and now have general-purpose access to Subversion.
Additionally, various new features were added, including:
@
character is now forbidden in usernames, with Brion Vibber having blacklisted it in
r16658. The original concern raised in
bug 6849 was that a common cause of unneeded blocks was users signing up with e-mail addresses as their names, against
the English Wikipedia's policy. Brion did not comment on that concern, but rather said that the symbol "interferes with multi-database tools and was meant to be banned years ago". The ban takes effect on every wiki running the
MediaWiki software package, including all
Wikimedia Foundation wikis.Users who already had names with the @
symbol in them will be permitted to log in for the time being, but at some point in the indefinite future it's possible that they'll be renamed. The similar-looking @
symbol (
Unicode character FF20, "full-width commercial at") is not banned.
<math>
tags, all committed by
Jens Frank but many of the patches written by
Carl Fürstenberg. The added functions are too numerous to list here, but were added in response to bugs
4528,
7749, and
7774, which contain complete lists in the form of patches. Fürstenberg and Frank also fixed
a bug in the display of uppercase Greek letters in mathematical formulas, and
another bug relating to the syntax of underbraces and arrays.#wpSummary { width: 360px }
to
Special:Mypage/monobook.css (or another skin as appropriate), although that might not be precisely the previous width.<ref>
and <references>
tags have been made less technical and more descriptive by Simetrical in
r16960 (
bug 6554).<ref>
tags, the one containing the contents of the reference no longer needs to be first (
bug 5885). This may help alleviate complaints that lengthy references clutter articles' wikitext and make it difficult to read. Patch is thanks to
Phil Boswell, committed by Andrew Garrett in
r17382.The only significant software improvement made this week was retroactive autoblocking ( bug 5149), added in r17486 by Andrew Garrett. When a user is blocked, the last IP address that they edited from will be immediately blocked. Previously, it was possible for a blocked user to log out without editing anything and then edit anonymously; this would only be stopped by an autoblock if the user attempted to edit a page before logging out. As an added bonus, CheckUser is now much faster, due to the indices that this modification required.
The Wikimedia Commons now allows users to specify that they should receive e-mail notification for changes to their talk page there, like Meta. ( bug 7870, enabled by Brion Vibber)
A number of minor tweaks were made to the interface this week:
Some changes were made to non-English messages. Internationalization help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are.
< Previous (2006-09-18) | Next (2006-11-13) >
Since the last edition of the technology report, there have been a number of noteworthy changes to software and server configuration. Most significantly, the AntiSpoof extension (written by Neil Harris in Python and translated to PHP by Brion Vibber) has been enabled on all Wikimedia sites. It is now impossible to register usernames that are too similar to ones already registered on the wiki. Due to concerns that the restrictions were too harsh, they were relaxed less than a day before press time, and discussion is ongoing on the mailing list as to what changes exactly should be made to the code to strike the right balance between false positives and false negatives.
Nick Jenkins, Simetrical, Evan Prodromou, Andrew Garrett, and Jason Richey have become developers and now have general-purpose access to Subversion.
Additionally, various new features were added, including:
@
character is now forbidden in usernames, with Brion Vibber having blacklisted it in
r16658. The original concern raised in
bug 6849 was that a common cause of unneeded blocks was users signing up with e-mail addresses as their names, against
the English Wikipedia's policy. Brion did not comment on that concern, but rather said that the symbol "interferes with multi-database tools and was meant to be banned years ago". The ban takes effect on every wiki running the
MediaWiki software package, including all
Wikimedia Foundation wikis.Users who already had names with the @
symbol in them will be permitted to log in for the time being, but at some point in the indefinite future it's possible that they'll be renamed. The similar-looking @
symbol (
Unicode character FF20, "full-width commercial at") is not banned.
<math>
tags, all committed by
Jens Frank but many of the patches written by
Carl Fürstenberg. The added functions are too numerous to list here, but were added in response to bugs
4528,
7749, and
7774, which contain complete lists in the form of patches. Fürstenberg and Frank also fixed
a bug in the display of uppercase Greek letters in mathematical formulas, and
another bug relating to the syntax of underbraces and arrays.#wpSummary { width: 360px }
to
Special:Mypage/monobook.css (or another skin as appropriate), although that might not be precisely the previous width.<ref>
and <references>
tags have been made less technical and more descriptive by Simetrical in
r16960 (
bug 6554).<ref>
tags, the one containing the contents of the reference no longer needs to be first (
bug 5885). This may help alleviate complaints that lengthy references clutter articles' wikitext and make it difficult to read. Patch is thanks to
Phil Boswell, committed by Andrew Garrett in
r17382.The only significant software improvement made this week was retroactive autoblocking ( bug 5149), added in r17486 by Andrew Garrett. When a user is blocked, the last IP address that they edited from will be immediately blocked. Previously, it was possible for a blocked user to log out without editing anything and then edit anonymously; this would only be stopped by an autoblock if the user attempted to edit a page before logging out. As an added bonus, CheckUser is now much faster, due to the indices that this modification required.
The Wikimedia Commons now allows users to specify that they should receive e-mail notification for changes to their talk page there, like Meta. ( bug 7870, enabled by Brion Vibber)
A number of minor tweaks were made to the interface this week:
Some changes were made to non-English messages. Internationalization help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are.
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