Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-02-26/Technology report
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
New features
Some changes to HTTP headers sent by MediaWiki should improve performance for users a long distance from the main server clusters of the Wikimedia Foundation (Tampa for almost all projects, Seoul for some East Asian-language projects). However, Tim Starling observed that "it's not as great a difference as we had hoped, barely user-visible. Research will continue." (Tim Starling and Brion Vibber, various revisions)
Superfluous links such as "next 200" and related links should no longer be shown on certain pages such as Special:Ipblocklist or Special:Listusers when there are no results. (Sui Min and Raimond Spekking, T10919, r20019, r20034)
Quickbar settings, which are used by some skins, can now be localized into different languages using MediaWiki:qbsettings-none, MediaWiki:qbsettings-fixedleft, MediaWiki:qbsettings-fixedright, MediaWiki:qbsettings-floatingleft, and MediaWiki:qbsettings-floatingright. (Niklas Laxström, T11032, r20033)
When there are no pages in a category, the "Pages in this category" heading will no longer be shown. (Raimond Spekking, T10132, r20039)
It is now possible for wikis to be configured to limit the rate at which e-mails can be sent. This was enabled for Wikimedia Foundation wikis, with up to 100 e-mails per hour per user account (or IP address, for anonymous users) permitted. By default, sysops and bureaucrats are exempt from this limit, as from all limits, but this is configurable. (Tim Starling; r20049, r20051, and r20052)
Images on image pages now have checkered backgrounds, so that any transparent parts will show up as checkers rather than white, light blue, or whatever other color is used by the wiki. (Leon Weber, r20065)
Fixed bugs
A workaround was instituted for Internet Explorer for Mac's poor handling of empty CSS/JS files. This could cause extremely slow loading of pages under some conditions. While this problem is fixed, IE/Mac has not been maintained since 2003, and users should consider switching to other browsers such as Camino or Safari. (Brion Vibber, T11044, r20018)
Internationalization
Some updates were made to non-English messages, specifically:
- Cantonese (thanks to Shinjiman)
- Catalan (thanks to Martorell, toniher and SMP)
- Finnish (thanks to Niklas Laxström)
- French (thanks to Rémi Kaupp)
- Georgian (thanks to Malafaya)
- German (thanks to Raimond Spekking and Arnomane)
- Hebrew (thanks to Rotem Liss)
- Indonesian (thanks to Ivan Lanin)
- Japanese (thanks to kaikkd)
- Lithuanian (thanks to Edgaras)
- Slovak (thanks to helix84)
Internationalization help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to Mediazilla.
Discuss this story
One thing that would very welcome is increasing the download speeds for portable devices, like BlackBerries - it takes ages for mine to load pages (it seems to spend most of its time dealing with style sheets and scripts and suchlike). I have a work-around, via Google, and there is http://en.wapedia.org and http://wikipedia.7val.com/ but reducing our overhead here would be great. -- ALoan (Talk) 10:27, 23 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]