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 1.43.0-wmf.2 (ce9d259), 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.
Pages with HTML entities in their name (such as [[<]]) are now invalid titles (such titles didn't work beforehand anyway, and just caused bugs). (
r28968,
bug 3097)
A bug causing
Special:Makesysop (a bureaucrat-only page) to stop working when
Special:Userrights (another bureaucrat-only page that performs the same function, among others) was enabled was fixed. (
r29092)
New features
A new generalised set of code for adding and removing user rights has been adopted. The code is currently set to allow exactly the same user rights changes as before (bureaucrats can make users into administrators, bureaucrats, and/or bots, and remove the bot flag from users; other changes require a steward), but it is now possible to easily fulfil requests for other permission combinations (so that, for instance, administrators could be allowed to grant or remove rollback from users), although such configuration changes still need to be made by a
shell user. Bureaucrats can now use
Special:Userrights as an alternative method of altering a user's rights (this is the same page that stewards use, but is less functional for bureaucrats). (
r28650,
bug 11645)
Configuration changes
The
Title Blacklist extension was enabled on Wikimedia wikis, allowing the creation of pages matching certain
regular expressions to be forbidden by administrators via
MediaWiki:Titleblacklist. This is in addition to the protection of nonexistent pages, which should be used instead if only one page title is to be blacklisted.
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.
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 1.43.0-wmf.2 (ce9d259), 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.
Pages with HTML entities in their name (such as [[<]]) are now invalid titles (such titles didn't work beforehand anyway, and just caused bugs). (
r28968,
bug 3097)
A bug causing
Special:Makesysop (a bureaucrat-only page) to stop working when
Special:Userrights (another bureaucrat-only page that performs the same function, among others) was enabled was fixed. (
r29092)
New features
A new generalised set of code for adding and removing user rights has been adopted. The code is currently set to allow exactly the same user rights changes as before (bureaucrats can make users into administrators, bureaucrats, and/or bots, and remove the bot flag from users; other changes require a steward), but it is now possible to easily fulfil requests for other permission combinations (so that, for instance, administrators could be allowed to grant or remove rollback from users), although such configuration changes still need to be made by a
shell user. Bureaucrats can now use
Special:Userrights as an alternative method of altering a user's rights (this is the same page that stewards use, but is less functional for bureaucrats). (
r28650,
bug 11645)
Configuration changes
The
Title Blacklist extension was enabled on Wikimedia wikis, allowing the creation of pages matching certain
regular expressions to be forbidden by administrators via
MediaWiki:Titleblacklist. This is in addition to the protection of nonexistent pages, which should be used instead if only one page title is to be blacklisted.
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.
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