The Signpost

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Bot approvals
  • EarwigBot (Task 16) – The bot leaves notices on the talk pages of WikiProjects that have Wikipedia-Books
  • EarwigBot (Task 15) – The bot replaces the deprecated parameters |penalty= and |status= in transclusions of {{Infobox criminal}} with |conviction_penalty= and |conviction_status=, respectively.
  • FrescoBot (Task 5) – Put {{db-blanked}} on pages created and blanked by a single author
  • SmackBot (Task 25) – Delink dates per full-date unlinking bot, but in portal space only
  • SPPatrolBot – Notifies WikiProjects and creators of pages of being BLP prodded.
  • SmackBot (Task 26) – Move non-redirects from the old VfD space to AfD where no conflict is found.
  • RjwilmsiBot (Task 3) – CiteCompletion: a script that completes fields within citations to common English-language news sites on the English Wikipedia. It works by taking the news article URL from the Wikipedia article page, looking up the news page and extracting the missing details of the news article based on per-site rules. User:Rjwilmsi/CiteCompletion.
  • ZéroBot – Adding and correcting interwiki-links
  • SmackBot (Task 28) – Substitute templates that are documented as "always subst".
For more information, please see Bots – Requests for approval.

MediaWiki 1.16

On 9 April, lead software engineer Tim Starling switched the servers of the Wikimedia Foundation to a beta version of the upcoming MediaWiki 1.16 software.[1] Although some of the most important 1.16 changes had already been applied to the server park, this was the first major software update since July 2009, when MediaWiki 1.15 was released. The switch itself was relatively uneventful and Wikipedia was back in business after just a few hours. As expected after 10 months of development, a substantial amount of problems and oversights were discovered in the hours and days following the switch to the new software.

You can find details about the MediaWiki 1.16 changes in the release notes and some highlights follow:

Other changes

References and notes


















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-26/Technology_report