MediaWiki 1.20/wmf1/overview

This is a future version of MediaWiki, which the WMF will start deploying in April 2012, 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, 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. But first:

New diff styles!
The biggest thing you'll notice is the new diff style ([/index.php?diff=516437 example on mediawiki.prg]).

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 ).

Misc

 * TODO: un-listify


 * Breaking Change The way page titles are logged in IRC has been changed.
 * New edit emails for watched pages 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.
 * Section edit and TOC hide/show links are excluded from selection and copy/paste on supporting browsers.
 * The preference to display missing links as “link?” (instead of just redlinks) has been removed.
 * Show deletion log on redlinked file pages, if applicable.
 * Show the correct diff when a section edit is rejected by the spam filter.
 * Two new messages (sharedupload-desc-edit and sharedupload-desc-create) are now displayed when editing the local page for a shared file.
 * &useskin=default will now always display the default skin. Useful for users with a preference for the non-default skin to look at something using the default skin.

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.
 * Even when editing a Javascript 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) support added.

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.
 * jQuery JSON plugin is now at version 2.3.

Under the hood
If you write extensions or administer a MediaWiki installation, here are some things you should be aware of:
 * Added TitleIsAlwaysKnown hook which gets called when determining if a page exists.
 * upload_by_url right can be (globally) restricted to given domains to prevent abuse.
 * For PostgreSQL users, we introduced $wgDebugDBTransactions to trace the transaction status.
 * 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 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 simply by clearing the values in the user_token column.

And we fixed some bugs:
 * The nosummary option is preserved even when a captcha is shown.
 * Fixed incorrect hash mismatch errors in the DiffHistoryBlob history compression method.
 * Inputbox can now be used to create a new section in the user's own page (i.e. with Special:MyPage and Special:MyTalk)
 * Add a switch for SETting the search_path (Postgres).
 * Returning to the previous page after logging in loses any array-valued parameters in the query string.
 * Updated compressOld.php documentation to mention the different usages of -s and -n parameters depending on compression type.

API changes in 1.20

 * There is now an API (action=tokens) just for getting tokens.
 * Add ability to retrieve maximum upload size from MediaWiki API.
 * MediaWiki API intro message about "HTML format" should mention the format parameter.
 * Allow descending order for list=watchlistraw.
 * Limit of bkusers of list=blocks and titles of action=query is not documented in API help.
 * API now allows editing using pageid
 * API now allows changing of protection level using pageid
 * API now allows comparing pages using pageids