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.

• Two bugs were fixed in the Cortado player (one of the options that can be used to play back audio and video files):
  • Video playback using Cortado now doesn't stall on computers with no audio devices available. (r31743, bug 11236)
  • Files shorter than about 0.5 seconds now play; previously the entire file would be clipped to nothing. (r31776, bug 11232)
• Special:MovePage now again repeats the current title as the default destination; this behaviour was broken by mistake. (r31911, bug 13343)
• Redirect pages now work properly if they start with stray whitespace. (r31922, bug 13344)
• Links to sections now work correctly in Internet Explorer if there are two sections on the same page with names that are almost the same but have different capitalisations. (r31931, bug 10721)
• YAML output from the API now escapes strings properly. (r31927, bug 12120)
• Special:Allpages can now handle the " character in page names. (r31984, bug 13359)
• The incorrect markup #REDIRECT [[target] (with a missing trailing ]) is now handled more sensibly. (r31996, bug 2084)

• Redirects are now not listed on Special:UnusedTemplates. (r31841, bug 8157)
• The sidebar elements that are generated by MediaWiki:Sidebar in the Monobook skin, rather than being part of the software, are now marked with the class generated-sidebar so that they can be detected by JavaScript. (r32016, bug 7251)

• All special pages have now been standardised to use CamelCase names; however, they are case-insensitive, and so using the old names will continue to work. (r31844, bug 11986)

• 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.

Developers are planning a pilot of the CentralAuth extension (better known as single user login); this pilot will be limited to administrators only.[1] (Note that this was accidentally enabled for a short time last week.)

The pilot is opt-in, and for the time being will only cause accounts with the same name and owned by the same user to be merged together into a single 'global account'; other existing users with the same name will not be affected. If and when the test takes place, administrators should note that setting a common email address or password on all accounts they own will help the merging process to identify which accounts are owned by the same user.

Even the full planned version of single user login itself does not do much more than associate accounts owned by the same user together, and allow a common username/password across all Wikimedia wikis; other similar features, such as crosswiki talkpage notification, are not part of the extension, although will become much easier to implement as a result of it.

Last week, the Board of Trustees approved a resolution, announced on Saturday by Chairperson Florence Devouard, that named the Election Committee for the 2008 Board elections. The seven-member committee's membership includes:

• Arria Belli, French Guiana
• Daniel Bryant, Australia
• Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild), Canada
• Jon Harald Søby, Norway
• Kwan Ting Chan (KTC), Scotland
• Mark Ryan, Australia
• Philippe Beaudette, United States

The committee is "responsible for planning and maintaining virtually every aspect of the board election." One of the responsibilities of the Committee is planning the type of voting used in the election; in previous elections, some users have questioned the traditional approval voting method used, arguing for other voting systems instead. Other responsibilities include determining suffrage criteria, drafting election pages on the Meta-Wiki, and vote auditing.

To supplement Wikipedia Weekly, comes NotTheWikipediaWeekly, a new podcast currently conducted weekly, via Skype. The latest episode features Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner.

• As of press time, the final decision on the host city for Wikimania 2009 had not yet been made.
• Keilana was successfully nominated to the Mediation Committee; a current nomination for Wizardman looks likely to pass.
• The Russian Wikipedia has reached 250,000 articles.
• The English Wiktionary has reached 750,000 entries.
• The Belarusian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
• The Spanish Wikinews has reached 3,000 articles.
• The Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
• The Central Bicolano Wikipedia has reached 200 articles.
• The Kazakh Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.

The Arbitration Committee closed four cases this week, and opened one case, leaving only two cases currently open.

• Franco-Mongol alliance: A case involving alleged misconduct over a dispute on Franco-Mongol alliance and related articles. As a result of the case, PHG was prohibited from editing articles relating to medieval or ancient history for a period of one year.

• Mantanmoreland: A case involving alleged sockpuppetry by Mantanmoreland, which he denies. In a decision, the committee found that a "definitive conclusion" cannot be reached (although they found that "the weight of the credible evidence taken as a whole is suggestive of or consistent with a relationship between the two accounts"), placed some articles on article probation, placed restrictions on current and future editors to the articles, and imposed a topic ban and direction only to edit from one account on Mantanmoreland. After the case was closed, Mantanmoreland was indefinitely blocked per this discussion, although this was later overturned, and a request for clarification was opened on the permissibility of the block.

• Ehud Lesar: A case involving a dispute involving Ehud Lesar, with alleged sockpuppetry on his part and alleged harassment by Fedayee, Eupator and others. As a result of the case, the committee found that there was insufficient evidence of sockpuppetry and overturned the block.

• Episodes and characters 2: A case involving alleged continuing disruption of articles concerning television series episodes and characters, following on from a prior case. An injunction had been enacted halting certain editing activities on these articles until the case is resolved. As a result of the case, TTN was prohibited from requesting merges, redirections or deletions of these articles, and all parties were instructed to "cease engaging in editorial conflict and to work collaboratively to develop a generally accepted and applicable approach to the articles in question".

• Betacommand 2: A case involving the actions of Betacommand and others in relation to BetacommandBot, a controversial bot which tags some non fair use compliant images. Betacommand's actions had previously been discussed on a subpage of WP:AN.

• 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. A remedy has been proposed, with the support of five arbitrators, counselling editors to consider contributing outside of disputed articles. Other remedies admonishing NE2 "to act with more awareness of the general needs of his co-editors and non-specialists", and encouraging him and other editors of the roads wikiproject in their work have the support of four arbitrators.