Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.4 (a8dd895), and changes with a version number higher than that will not yet be active.

Fixed bugs

A serious bug

A MediaWiki software bug occurred on 10 July, 2007 for slightly over half an hour, causing edits and reverts to numerous unrelated pages across Wikipedia to affect Wikipedia:Wikipedians, rather than the page that the user making the edit was trying to revert to. It started with this edit by Tiago Heitor, which was to an unrelated article. Thinking it was vandalism, KnowledgeOfSelf reverted the edit, but then reverted it back. Shortly after, another completely unrelated revert occurred, to a version that was from another totally unrelated page. After many continuous edits and reverts, KnowledgeOfSelf decided to report the problem to the Admins' noticeboard. The problem persisted while three separate threads were posted to the noticeboard. After some 50 or so strange edits, W.marsh protected the page while it was still in chaos. Although the page was protected, administrators were still accidentally posting edits to the page. The error was fixed when Brion VIBBER notified the village pump that he had accidentally broken it, and that the problem was resolved. Still, users complained that talkpage reversions were taking them into Wikipedia:Wikipedians.

On a technical level, the bug was caused by a typo in r23973, which was fixed immediately afterwards in r23974; Wikipedia:Wikipedians was the page causing trouble because it contained the revision with revision number 1. (This is not Wikipedia's first edit, because other software has been used before MediaWiki in the history of Wikipedia; that page has earlier revisions with higher numbers, and the number given is likely due to the transition to new 'phase II' software during January 2002.)

New features

Configuration changes

Other technology news

Ongoing news

+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.
No comments yet. Yours could be the first!





















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-07-16/Technology_report