Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-10-05/Technology report

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.5 (d64f667), 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.

Babaco release

The second usability release, Babaco, is now available on all Wikimedia projects for testing. The new release has three new features relating to the edit window. The new features can be enabled through your user preferences, under the "Editing" tab and then "Experimental features". The three features are:

  • an enhanced editing toolbar
  • help for adding advanced wiki text
  • a navigable table of contents

The editing toolbar changes the layout of buttons, putting more advanced features in a dropdown menu, and adds a link to adding special characters and to a new help, which incorporates a brief, cheat-sheet style description of editing syntax into the dropdown menu. The navigable table of contents adds a right-hand side menu to the editing window, enabling you to jump to a new section of the article while editing it. Problems can be reported on the Babaco talk page.

Bots approved

One bot / bot task was approved in the past week:

Bug fixes

  • Search box no longer suggests unavailable special pages. (r57282, bug 20885)
  • A "Create this page" link is no longer displayed when searching for a non-existent special page. (r57359, bug 20948)