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.

• The new double-redirect-fixing feature now correctly fixes redirects to sections of a moved page. (r37999, bug 14904)
• Setting an explicit limit=50 on Special:Recentchanges now gives 50 entries, rather than taking the number of entries set in the reader's preferences. (r38036, bug 14659)

• Double redirects (redirects which redirect to another redirect) created by new pagemoves are now fixed automatically by the software; edits made by such fixing are attributed to User:Redirect fixer, which operates much like a bot (although as a software feature, it only has bot abilities when operated by the MediaWiki software and no special powers when operated by anyone else), in that it works by making edits and does not operate instantly (but rather when it gets round to fixing the redirect). See this message for more details. (Note that the feature has changed slightly since that message; in order to prevent a double redirect being fixed, you now need to place __STATICREDIRECT__ on the double redirect page). (r37928, bug 4578)
• New magic words __INDEX__ and __NOINDEX__ control whether a page can be indexed by search engines (although note that Wikimedia's robots.txt, which excludes things like AfD subpages, takes precedence over this). The keywords do nothing in "content namespaces" ― which means the main namespace on the English Wikipedia, but other sites may have additional content namespaces. (r37973, bug 8068)

• 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 Chinese Wikipedia has been unblocked within most, if not all, of China, along with other websites such as the BBC, likely in preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which begin on August 8. Sensitive topics, such as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, remain blocked, however.

On August 1, the top ten Wikipedias in the Wikipedia.org portal were reorganized, following a poll on Meta. It used to be arranged by the number of articles a Wikipedia has, but is now arranged according to the number of visitors each Wikipedia has.

This led to quite a few changes within the top ten Wikipedias themselves, but only one language was actually replaced among the ten; the Dutch Wikipedia (467,000 articles) was replaced by the newly-unblocked Chinese Wikipedia (200,000 articles).

The result of the third question in the poll concerns whether or not there should be some kind of clue about the visitor’s preferred language (as “determined by the browser, OS or IP”), and if so, how that should be implemented. The poll was definitely in favour of having some sort of clue, but the type of clue has not yet been determined. The type that got the most votes was the one about replacing the last language of the top ten with the language of the local user.

• NASA and the Internet Archive, in a combined effort, opened NASA Images, a repository for public domain satellite images.
• David Shankbone posted a blog entry detailing the process he used to obtain photographs and interviews with famous article subjects, including Al Sharpton and Augusten Burroughs.
• The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles.
• The Norwegian Wiktionary has reached 10,000 articles.

The Arbitration Committee opened one case this week, and did not close any, leaving three currently open.

• SlimVirgin-Lar: A case brought by Thatcher, asking the committee to review the use of checkuser by Lar, in the light of comments by SlimVirgin (here, inter alia), alleging that he misused the tool. Evidence is to be submitted privately to the committee by e-mail.

• Geogre-William M. Connolley: A case involving wheel warring between Geogre and William M. Connolley. William M. Connolley inappropriately extended a block on Giano II, while Geogre inappropriately reversed the block, and reversed page protection on Giano's talk page. The case is currently in the voting phase; proposed remedies include:
  • Four different versions of a remedy modifying or removing remedy 2.2 in IRC. All versions are supported by three to five arbitrators, and opposed by one to two arbitrators.
  • Currently passing is a remedy prohibiting Geogre and Connolley from taking any administrative action with respect to Giano II.

• C68-FM-SV: A case involving disputes between Cla68, FeloniousMonk, SlimVirgin, JzG, and others. The case, which has seen little-to-no public input from arbitrators, is currently subject to a motion to dismiss, with the support of one arbitrator, and the opposition of one.