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.

• Administrators are no longer shown CAPTCHAs when creating accounts for other users. (r38796, bug 12142)
• Shared IPs (those on the autoblock whitelist) are no longer blocked automatically by the Torblock extension. (r38853, bug 14934)
• Redlinks are no longer erroneously marked with the "stub" class (used for links to short articles if a stub threshold has been set in the user's preferences). (r38980, bug 15091)
• Redirects no longer allow unrelated text between the #REDIRECT and the link to the page being redirected to. (r38737, bug 15053)
• Special:Export via category now works even if the Category: prefix is given at the start of the category name. (r39184, bug 14790)

• The .ogv extension is now permitted on uploaded files, as an alternative to .ogg (they refer to the same video format Ogg Theora, but .ogg is also commonly used for Ogg Vorbis sound files). (r35978, bug 14315)
• It's now possible to query the API to find out how many titles (or values of some other multivalue parameter) are simultaneously accepted in an API query. (r38639, bug 15048)
• A new requestid= API parameter can be given to any API request; it is simply repeated back to the user requesting the query in the query output, to help distinguish requests. (r38638, bug 15044)
• A new interface message MediaWiki:Pagetitle-view-mainpage can be set to change the HTML <title> of the main page (regardless of whether it is at Main Page or some other location). (r38730, bug 15007)
• Special:Contributions now displays the name of the user for whom contributions are being checked in the HTML <title> of the page. (r38795, bug 14921)
• CSS classes ns-talk and ns-subject have been added to distinguish talk pages from non-talk pages (r39054, bug 15079); also, CSS classes have been added to show what skin is being used to show the page (r39058, bug 15052).
• It is now possible for administrators to place information which will be shown on the edit page for a particular page, by modifying specially-named interface messages. (r39121, bug 15102). For example, MediaWiki:Editnotice-0 will appear when editing any page in article space, and MediaWiki:Editnotice-0-Main_Page will appear when editing the Main Page.

• Wikipedia:Changing username and its subpages are now excluded via robots.txt, and thus will not show up in search engines. (bug 14793http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14793)

• A large variety of page moves were blocked accidentally for a while due to a Wikipedia administrator misconfiguring an anti-vandalism feature recently; this has now been fixed.

• 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.

Wikipedian Jeffpw passed away on 7 August. Jeff, a resident of Amsterdam, made over 9,000 edits since joining Wikipedia in May 2005. He was active in the LGBT studies WikiProject, and was largely responsible for bringing James Robert Baker to featured article status, and bringing Daniel Rodriguez to good article status.

Over the past few weeks, Jeff had been coping with the death of his husband, Isaac, something that friends within the Wikipedia community had been helping him with. Jeff's death was brought to the attention of the community by his sister, Debbie, who left a note on Jeff's talk page, thanking his friends:

Hello, I'm Debbie. Many of you have given your support and condolences to Jeffpw over the last many weeks since he lost Isaac. I'm Jeff's sister (and know nothing about Wikipedia, except that my brother enjoyed the site, the friendship and support).

I hope I'm going about this in the right way, if not, I'm so sorry.

My brother died yesterday- I suppose of a broken heart. But he received so much compassion from all of you, and you all made these last days (almost) bearable to him. I am so grateful to you and HE was so grateful. He intended to acknowledge each condolence sent to him individually, but since he can't, I thought I'd let you know.

The world will have a little less color without him. I love him and miss him already.

This statement was confirmed by checkuser evidence.

In Jeff's memory, a user sub-page has been created, containing condolences from the community. Jeff was 46 years old.

On Monday, the 2.5 millionth English article was created. No official attempt was made to determine what the milestone article was, although it has been suggested that Joe Connor, one of 35 pre-written stubs added by Wizardman, might be the milestone article.

Three new job openings at the Wikimedia Foundation were all advertised this week, all within the technology department. The jobs are:

• Mid-level software developer: A full-time position; responsible for MediaWiki development, and configuration of Wikimedia websites and third-party software.
• Entry-level software developer/IT support: A full-time position; responsible for development of MediaWiki and open-source software used by the Foundation, and for providing technical support for the Foundation's office.
• Mid-level system administrator: A position open to remote work; responsible for configuring software, maintaining servers and backups, and assisting with the planning of hardware configuration.

All positions are open until August 27.

• Newyorkbrad has returned to editing, and to the Arbitration Committee. His term is scheduled to expire in December 2010.
• Videos from Wikimania 2008 are now available for download in .mpg format.
• After a long wait, the IRC Group Contacts have been allowed to set new cloaks for all Wikimedia projects.
• The Upper Sorbian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
• The Hebrew Wikipedia has reached 80,000 articles.
• The Korean Wikipedia has reached 70,000 articles.
• The Irish Wikipedia has reached 7,000 articles.
• The Malayalam Wikipedia has reached 7,000 articles.
• The Malayalam Wiktionary has reached 3,000 entries.
• The Gujarati Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.

The Arbitration Committee opened one new case this week, and did not close any cases, leaving four currently open. There is also a motion open on a previous case.

• A motion is open in the Privatemusings case, which was originally closed in December 2007. If approved, Remedy 2, which restricted Privatemusings from editing articles related to biographies of living persons, would be removed. In its place, Privatemusings would be put under the mentorship of Lar, Jayvdb and Durova; this mentorship would be solely regarding the editing of biographies of living persons. If no issues arise, the mentorship would lapse 90 days after its inception. At present, five arbitrators support the motion, and none oppose it (the support of eight is necessary to adopt the motion).

• Alastair Haines: A case involving Alastair Haines and other users.

• 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, and voting will presumably occur privately as well.

• 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 four to five arbitrators, and opposed by three to four arbitrators.
  • Currently passing is a remedy prohibiting Geogre and Connolley from taking any administrative action with respect to Giano II. There is also an injunction in effect prohibiting blocks or unblocks of Giano without the consent of a committee member.

• 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.