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.8 (f08e6b3), 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
New features
- There is a new special page Special:FileDuplicateSearch that allows you to search for all images which are completely identical to a given image (that is, same format, pixel-identical, same metadata, etc.). (r32180, bug 1459)
Other changes
- The eiredirect option to the embeddedin API query has been removed, because it didn't actually make any difference to the query's results. (r32125, bug 13418)
- A category table is currently being added to the Wikimedia databases; when it is complete, it will allow various category-related bugs to be fixed (mostly relating to counting the number of items in a category correctly). (bug 13326http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13326)
- The SHA1 hash of uploaded images is now stored; this makes checks for duplicate images easier (and has made some of this week's image-related changes possible). (bug 5763http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5763)
- The search feature on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia wikis has been synchronised with the search feature used by most small MediaWiki wikis. As a result, several bugs have been fixed and features have been added to the search form (for instance, a search within the image namespace will now display the images as well as the text on the image pages).
Other technology news
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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