MediaWiki 1.20/wmf1/overview

This is the latest version of MediaWiki, which the WMF has begun to deploy, and released for other MediaWiki administrators to use sometime after that. Look at the Roadmap for updates and at the 1.20 roadmap and the software deployments calendar for the deployment schedule.

Starting in April 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation is aiming to deploy MediaWiki to its projects more often (and almost directly from the master branch) through incremental "wmf"-branches within the 1.20 release cylcle (1.20wmf1 (the version currently in use on this wiki), 1.20wmf2, and so on). The 1.20.0 stable tarball is expected to come out in summer or fall of 2012 (but one can also stay current on the bleeding-edge through the git master).

What's new?
The comprehensive list of what's new will be in the release notes. The following is an attempt to provide a useful summary.

User-facing changes

 * New diff styles
 * The biggest thing you'll notice is the new diff style ([/index.php?diff=516437 example on mediawiki.org]), designed to improve the experience of colour-blind and partially sighted visitors.


 * Improved "show changes" functionality in the MediaWiki namespace
 * Also, clicking the "Show changes" button when creating a local override for an interface message in the MediaWiki namespace will now generate a diff against the default system message value. When such page is created, the edit box is preloaded with the default value, so it makes sense that the diff is based on that (previously, the "previous" side of the diff was just blank!).


 * Hiding redirects in page lists
 * There is a new option on Special:Prefixindex and Special:Allpages to hide redirects (addressing ).


 * Redlink customisation preference removed
 * The preference to display missing links as “link ? ” (instead of just redlinks) has been removed . the same effect can still be generated via user CSS, however.


 * Miscellaneous
 * New edit emails for watched pages will now always provide a link to the edit which triggered the mail (fixing ). And “Creating” is now given in the page title instead of “Editing” when you are creating a page (fixing ).
 * Special:Listusers now includes a link to the user's talk page and contributions.
 * When selecting large areas of the page, section edit links and TOC hide/show links are excluded from the copied text on supporting browsers.
 * The deletion log will now be shown on redlinked file pages, if applicable.
 * Two new messages (sharedupload-desc-edit and sharedupload-desc-create) are now displayed when editing the local page for a shared file.

For Power Users
We added some features for experienced editors:
 * CSS classes can be used to change the appearance of a verified email in user preferences.
 * MediaWiki now uses cryptographically random numbers for increased security while generating tokens. (See MWCryptRand.)
 * is now available in addition to since the text from  can change.
 * #speciale parser function, in addition to the already defined #special parser function, to give the localized, encoded special page name. Useful for use in the param list of fullurl.
 * The jQuery JSON plugin, which can be accessed from user JavaScript, is now at version 2.3.
 * Inputbox can now be used to create a new section in the user's own page (i.e. with Special:MyPage and Special:MyTalk)

Localization
MediaWiki supports over 350 languages. Many localisations are updated regularly. Below only new and removed languages are listed, as well as changes to languages because of Bugzilla reports.


 * Localised parentheses are now used in more special pages.
 * When editing a Javascript or CSS page on a Right-to-Left wiki the edit box is now Left-to-Right.
 * Rendering of numbered lists in devanagari numbers is now supported where browser support is available.
 * Namespace gender aliases have been added for Albanian languages (sq & aln) and Croatian (hr). ( and )
 * Mizo (lus) language support added.

API and bot-facing changes

 * Breaking Change The way page titles are logged in IRC has been changed.
 * There is now an API (action=tokens) just for getting tokens.
 * meta=siteinfo now includes the maximum upload size.
 * MediaWiki API intro message about "HTML format" now mentions the format parameter.
 * Descending order is allowed for list=watchlistraw.
 * The limits on bkusers (with list=blocks) and on titles (with action=query</tt>) is now documented in the API help.
 * The API now allows the use of pageids to specify pages for editing, protection level changes, or comparisons. (,, and )

Under the hood
If you write extensions or administer a MediaWiki installation, here are some things you should be aware of:
 * &useskin=default</tt> will now always display the default skin. This is useful for users with a preference for the non-default skin to look at something using the default skin.
 * Added TitleIsAlwaysKnown hook which gets called when determining if a page exists.
 * Updated compressOld.php documentation to mention the different usages of -s and -n parameters depending on compression type.
 * upload_by_url</tt> right can be (globally) restricted to given domains to prevent abuse.
 * The parser itself is now given as an additional argument to ParserMakeImageParams. **
 * Special:Version has been updated now that we've switched Git. ( and )
 * generateSitemap.php can now optionally skip redirect pages.
 * The user_token</tt> field is now left empty until a user attempts to login and cookies need to be set.
 * As a result, it is now possible to reset every user's user_token</tt> simply by clearing the values in the user_token</tt> column.
 * For PostgreSQL users
 * We introduced $wgDebugDBTransactions to trace the transaction status.
 * The schema is now included in the search_path</tt>.

And we fixed some bugs...

 * The nosummary</tt> option is now preserved even when a captcha is shown.
 * Hash mismatch errors in the DiffHistoryBlob history compression method were fixed.
 * Query string parameters are no longer lost when returning to a page after logging in.
 * Show the correct diff when a section edit is rejected by the spam filter.

And there's more in the release notes.