Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-12-11/Technology report

Technology report

MediaWiki 1.22 released

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On 6 December, the latest version of the MediaWiki software was released. In development from March through October 2013, the release featured anti-spam and counter-vandalism improvements. The patrolling interface has been overhauled, and an extension designed to thwart basic spambots, SimpleAntiSpam, is now part of the core software. Other editing improvements include showing "(no difference)" when viewing a diff with no visible changes, and a confirmation message that lets editors know that their edit was saved. The ability to install some extensions using PHP's dependency manager, Composer, was also added.

The release was delayed by a week while it was debated whether to re-add to the signup page interface messages that had previously been removed. While the messages were eventually re-added, they will be blanked on all Wikimedia wikis and possibly protected (bugzilla:56455#c44).

More information about MediaWiki 1.22 can be found in the release announcement and on MediaWiki.org.

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.

Engineering report published: The November 2013 report covering the Wikimedia Foundation's engineering activities has been published onwiki (blog version), and in summary form.
CirrusSearch, the new search backend, is being re-enabled on sites that formerly had it. Users are encouraged to test the new backend by adding the url parameter "srbackend=CirrusSearch" when searching or by enabling a Beta Feature.
A bug with the Wikidata property parser function not working was found. It is being tracked as bug 58099.
A legend explaining the "N", "m", "b" and "!" indicators on Special:RecentChanges and Special:Watchlist was added. It can be seen on MediaWiki.org, and will be deployed with the 1.23wmf6 branch. This feature was inspired by one on the Russian Wikipedia.
A major update of the ProofreadPage extension, used by Wikisource, was deployed. A few bugs were discovered upon deployment, and are being worked on.
A discussion was started on wikimedia-l by User:Yurik about where to redirect the m.wikipedia.org domain.
A bug which overcounted page views since July was discovered. A report has been published by Erik Zachte analyzing the trend after the data was corrected.
An initial alpha release of the Flow discussion system was deployed to a few pages on mediawiki.org. You can test it on mw:Talk:Sandbox, and give feedback at mw:Talk:Flow.