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.

• An obscure problem with diffs was finally tracked down and (hopefully) fixed this week; it occasionally caused corrupted output from the diff engine. The problem turned out to be a version mismatch between the executable and operating system on some specific Wikimedia servers. (T11533 and many duplicates; was fixed without changing the code (just the executable), so no version number)
• Some actions now work correctly with respect to some pages whose name starts with / (such as Template:/doc). (r33742, bug 13822)
• The drop-down search suggestion box (enabled this week) now works in non-Monobook-based skins. (r33759, bug 13824)

• A range of new mathematical functions was added to {{#expr:}}: sin, cos, tan, asin, acos, atan, exp, ln, abs, floor, trunc, ceil, ^. The constants pi and e were also added. (r33780, bug 13216)
• The API now accepts prop=categoryinfo queries, which queries information such as a category's size. (r33914, bug 13735)
• A warning is now given when uploading an image with the same name as an image on Commons. (r33972, bug 889)

• Some HTTP cookies are now marked HTTPOnly; this reduces the effects that certain types of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities (if any exist) would have if they were exploited.
• The search box now suggests search terms. (There is an option to turn this behaviour off; see the 'Search' tab of Special:Preferences.)

• 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 election committee for the 2008 board elections officially announced the elections, and some of the procedures behind the elections, in a post circulated across various pages and mailing lists last week:

The 2008 Board election committee announces the 2008 election process. Wikimedians will have the opportunity to elect one candidate from the Wikimedia community to serve as a representative on the Board of Trustees. The successful candidate will serve a one-year term, ending in July 2009.

Candidates may nominate themselves for election between May 8 and May 22, and the voting will occur between 1 June and 21 June. For more information on the voting and candidate requirements, see <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008>.

The voting system to be used in this election has not yet been confirmed, however voting will be by secret ballot, and confidentiality will be strictly maintained.

Votes will again be cast and counted on a server owned by an independent, neutral third party, Software in the Public Interest (SPI). SPI will hold cryptographic keys and be responsible for tallying the votes and providing final vote counts to the Election Committee. SPI provided excellent help during the 2007 elections.

Further information can be found at m:Board elections/2008/en Questions may be directed to the Election Committee at m:Talk:Board elections/2008/en. If you are interested in translating official election pages into your own language, please see m:Board elections/2008/Translation.

For the election committee,

Philippe Beaudette

The annual RecentChangesCamp meeting will be held this year on May 9–11. RecentChangesCamp is a working meeting for all wiki-involved people from around the world. Three previous events have been held in Portland, Oregon and Montreal, and this year's will be in Palo Alto, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Everyone involved in wikis—especially Wikipedians and other Wikimedians—are invited to participate. The two-day working event is free-of-charge for all comers. The volunteer organizers sincerely request an RSVP by participants.

After a mid-April expansion of their dataset, Alexa Internet now ranks Wikipedia.org as the 7th most-trafficked Internet domain, up from 9th. According to Alexa's new estimates, Wikipedia reaches about 10% of all Internet users each day (with 52% of that traffic for English Wikipedia); before the revision the average was about 6% reach.

• The Lithuanian Wiktionary has reached 40,000 articles.
• The Malayalam Wiktionary has reached 2,000 articles.

The Arbitration Committee did not open or close any cases this week, leaving three currently open.

• Homeopathy: A dispute involving a number of editors over the Homeopathy article.

• Tango: A case involving a controversial block of MONGO by Tango under this finding. A remedy suspending Tango's use of the blocking tool for six months has the support of three arbitrators.

• Prem Rawat: A case involving the actions of editors on Prem Rawat and related articles. If closed, remedies would pass placing Rawat-related articles on article probation and reminding editors with a possible or perceived conflict of interest to comply with Wikipedia policies on NPOV and conflict of interest. However, the motion to close is opposed by three arbitrators.