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 1.44.0-wmf.3 (b4aac1f), 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.

• The meta=userinfo query of the API now places <query> tags around the query, the same as with other API queries, when returning results in XML format. (r28867, bug 12413)
• Pages with HTML entities in their name (such as [[&lt;]]) 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)

• 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)

• 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.

• 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.