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.12 (8b8c762), 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.

• Some minor HTML errors in the produced HTML during an edit conflict have been fixed. (r29474, bug 12553)
• section=0 now returns just section 0 when used with action=raw, rather than the entire page. (r29476, bug 12505)
• The definition of a category timestamp (not normally visible to users, but available via the API and used by some scripts, and on some other projects) has changed; the category timestamp for a page now never changes when the page is renamed (previously it did only if the category was included without an explicit sortkey). (r29615, bug 12584)
• The dropdown box for selecting a namespace on Special:Newpages now reflects the true setting of the namespace filter when the page is loaded; previously it sometimes incorrectly displayed that all namespaces were included even though the filter was set to the article namespace only. (r29618, bug 12588)
• When a bot creates a page, that edit now again doesn't appear in Recent Changes by default. (This behaviour used to be the case, but was accidentally broken and fixed again.) (r29699, bug 12611)

• API queries for a page's protection status now also query whether the page is create-protected. (r29427, bug 12543)
• It's now possible for a bot-flagged user to make an edit that isn't bot-flagged, by appending &bot=0 to the end of the relevant URL. (r29539, bug 12574)
• It was also realised this week that at some point it became possible to write universal interwiki prefixes; that is, an interwiki prefix that works no matter which Wikimedia wiki the prefix is rendered on. The link should be written [[m:project:language:page name]] (e.g. m:w:en:WP:POST); this routes the parsing of the links via Meta, thus making them universally correct. (bug 4285)

• The user rights framework configuration was changed for the English Wikipedia this week, allowing administrators to cause users to become 'rollbackers' or to remove that right (see related story). A rollbacker can perform rollback in much the same way that an administrator can, except that if the rollbacker is not also a bot the rate at which rollbacks may be done is limited (to 5 per minute, or 5 per 2 minutes if rollback is for some reason granted to a non-autoconfirmed user). (bug 12534)

• A report on some of this week's site operations is available; there was a performance review of the software. This made several changes, especially to the way that caching works; also, the Title Blacklist extension (controlled via MediaWiki:Titleblacklist) was disabled pending a performance improvement, and the 'refresh' button on the browser is now similar to action=purge in fewer situations than before. There were other related miscellaneous changes such as changing MediaWiki:Pagecategories from the default {{PLURAL:$1|Category|Categories}} to just Categories; on a wiki as large as the English Wikipedia, and for a message that needs to appear on most pages, this actually makes a significant difference.
• Four new Wikimedia wikis have been created this week:
  • Lower Sorbian Wikipedia (bug 12181, m:Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Lower Sorbian 2, http://dsb.wikipedia.org)
  • Crimean Tatar Wikipedia (bug 12399, m:Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Crimean Tatar 2, http://crh.wikipedia.org)
  • Saterland Frisian Wikipedia (bug 12502, m:Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Saterland Frisian, http://stq.wikipedia.org)
  • Greek Wikiversity (bug 12587, m:Requests_for_new_languages/Wikiversity_Greek, http://el.wikiversity.org)
• Wikipedia locked up for about 10 minutes on 11 January due to the rename of User:Warlordjohncarter (who has a server edit count of over 76000) to User:John Carter; the servers take some time to process a rename of that size.

• 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.

The Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser ended on Tuesday, January 8. At the end of the fundraiser, about 44,600 people had donated at least US$1, and the Foundation has raised nearly $1,500,000. In addition, Erik Möller announced a record $500,000 unrestricted donation, received from an anonymous donor, which along with offline donations brought the fundraiser's total just over $2 million.

Dragons flight (Robert A. Rohde) prepared a series of graphs analyzing this fundraiser as compared to previous fundraisers.

Scott Laws, username Dalf, died of colon cancer on 14 September, 2007. He had been a long-term Wikipedian, editing since before 2005 and accumulating over 3,000 edits. Among the articles he edited were Imperial Japanese Navy, Horcrux, and Nuclear power. Laws was an alumnus of Hickman High School and the University of Missouri; he worked for Microsoft's Hotmail in Silicon Valley until he was diagnosed with cancer in 2004. He was 30 years old.

• In cranes, a symbol of hope, The Columbia Missourian, July 17, 2007.
• Terminally ill cancer patient rallied behind ‘1,000 cranes’, The Columbia Missourian, Sept. 15, 2007.

The Commons Picture of the Year competition for 2007 is now open. Any Wikimedian with more than 200 edits is eligible to vote. There are two rounds of voting (round 1 is Jan 10-17, the final is 20-24 Jan). Information about the voting method and how to get a voting token is at Commons:Picture of the Year/2007/Voting. (Voting is being conducted on custom software on the toolserver written by User:Bryan.)

• January 15 is Wikipedia Day.
• The Crimean Tatar Wikipedia, Lower Sorbian Wikipedia, Saterland Frisian Wikipedia and Greek Wikiversity have been created.
• In discussion is a new speedy deletion criterion. CSD T3 ("Templates that are not employed in any useful fashion, and are either substantial duplications of another template, or hardcoded instances of another template where the same functionality could be provided by that other template, may be deleted after being tagged for seven days.") is under discussion on the CSD talk page.
• The Editor's index to Wikipedia, developed in userspace by John Broughton, has been moved to projectspace.
• The Romanian Wikipedia reaches 100,000 articles.
• The Lithuanian Wiktionary has reached 20,000 articles.
• The Korean Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
• The Portuguese Wikinews has reached 50,000 edits.
• The Yoruba Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
• The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 1,000,000 edits.
• The Wikipedia of Ripuarian languages has reached 300 users.

The Arbitration Committee opened four new cases this week, and closed five cases, leaving seven currently open.

• Dbachmann: A case involving alleged misconduct on the part of administrator Dbachmann and editing by other users on several race-related articles. As a result of the case, Dbachmann was "reminded" not to use administrator tools in editing disputes, and the articles Afrocentrism and Race of ancient Egyptians were placed on article probation.

• Zeraeph: A case involving alleged misconduct by Zeraeph. As a result of the case, Zeraeph was banned for one year.

• John Gohde 2: A case involving alleged misconduct by John Gohde, which he denied. As a result of the case, Gohde was banned for one year.

• Jim62sch: A case involving alleged off-wiki harrasment by Jim62sch, possibly involving reporting of potential on-wiki violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. As a result of the case, Jim62sch was instructed to "refrain from making any comments to another user that could reasonably be construed as harassing, threatening, or bullying".

• John Buscema: A case involving editing of the John Buscema article by editors including Tenebrae and Skyelarke. As a result of the case, both editors were banned from editing that article for three months.

• Waterboarding: A case involving a dispute between a large number of editors on Waterboarding, relating to the question as to whether the technique should be described as torture.

• Palestine-Israel articles: Yet another case relating to alleged disruption on Israel- and Palestine-related articles.

• Bluemarine: A case involving alleged civility and COI violations by User:Bluemarine on Matt Sanchez, the article on himself, which has also been edited tendentiously (from a hostile point of view) by a number of other editors, many of whom have been blocked.

• R. fiend: A case involving a controversial block of Ed Poor by R. fiend. The case has been suspended, since R. fiend has expressed his intention to resign adminship.

• Highways 2: A case involving editing by NE2 on articles relating to WikiProject U.S. Roads, allegedly against consensus of other editors involved with that wikiproject.

• IRC: A case involving an alleged personal attack by Tony Sidaway on Bishonen on #wikipedia-en-admins, which led to an edit war on WP:WEA, involving page protection and unprotection by David Gerard, Geogre and others, and a block of Giano II, which was quickly undone. Various findings of fact have been proposed relating to the editors in dispute, but no remedies have yet been proposed by arbitrators.

• Matthew Hoffman: A case involving controversial blocks of MatthewHoffman by a vanished user. Various remedies were proposed including either desysopping or admonishing the vanished user and annotating Matthew Hoffman's block log to reflect the arbitrators' view that the blocks were unjustified. A motion has been passed suspending the case for 30 days (until approximately 20 January , 2008) to allow for community input at a request for comment.