MediaWiki 1.18

MediaWiki 1.18 is scheduled for deployment to Wikimedia websites in the coming weeks:


 * Monday, September 19 (-20), 23:00-01:00 UTC (4pm-6pm PDT): MediaWiki 1.18 deployment to test2
 * Wednesday, September 21 (-22), 23:00-03:00 UTC (4pm-8pm PDT): MediaWiki 1.18 stage 1 deployment (simplewiki, simplewiktionary, usabilitywiki, strategywiki, mediawikiwiki, hewikisource)
 * Monday, September 26 (-27), 23:00-03:00 UTC (4pm-8pm PDT): MediaWiki 1.18 stage 2 deployment (metawiki, enwikiquote, enwikibooks, betawikiversity, eowiki, nlwiki)
 * Tuesday, October 4 (-5), 23:00-03:00 UTC (4pm-8pm PDT): MediaWiki 1.18 stage 3 deployment (remaining wikis)

We plan to release MediaWiki 1.18 sometime shortly after that.

See also the full release notes.

What's new?
We bring you new features, bug fixes and new exciting bugs for the next version release. This place will try to give you an overview of the most important features.



MediaWiki now supports women!
Women are most probably the most common gender in the human species, yet we used a neutral noun or pronoun to link to their user pages. In English this is not an issue since 'user' matches both genders, but in languages without gender-neutral nouns, we were using masculine words by default. Since we support other languages, we now adapt the user links to reflect the user's gender.

This feature requires the user to set their gender as "male" or "female" in their personal preferences. An "undisclosed" option is also available.

Rotate pictures


We are now able to verify how the photographer took the photo. Was its camera upside down? We will rotate the picture preview accordingly, the source photo will remain unchanged though.

Extract information from pictures
MediaWiki can now extract much more embedded metadata from uploaded images (Exif, IPTC, XMP and more). For example, if the image has an embedded description, author, GPS coordinates, copyright statement or a variety of other types of potential information, it will now be displayed on the image description page. (Previously only limited Exif data was shown)

Improved directionality support


A lot of work has been done, and is still being done, to fix directionality bugs (Left-To-Right, Right-To-Left). Most notably bug 6100 is fixed, which allows to display an RTL interface on an LTR wiki properly (and vice versa). This was developed under $wgBetterDirectionality, which is now no longer used because the improvements are merged with the core code.

A positive consequence is that the page content on wikis with multiple scripts is aligned according to the direction of the selected variant. For example, on a Kazakh language wiki, selecting the Arabic script variant will align the text as RTL, while selecting the Latin or Cyrillic variant will align it as LTR.

Easily find where you can customize the interface
MediaWiki allows you to customize the user interface by editing pages in the MediaWiki namespace. However, there are a lot of such pages, and it is often hard to find which one is the right one, even with the big list at Special:AllMessages. Now there is a new pseudo-language to help people find such messages - qqx. All one has to do is append ?uselang=qqx to the url. For example consider [ this page] with the message keys showing.

New plugin for collapsible elements
The new jQuery.makeCollapsible allows you to create collapsible tables, lists and so on, by adding the class  to the elements. See the manual for details.

Protocol-relative URLs
MediaWiki now supports protocol- relative URLs in links, interwiki targets and $wgServer. Protocol-relative URLs look like  ; the browser will recognize this as   when following a link from an HTTP page, and   when following a link from an HTTPS page. This way, protocol-relative URLs enable a wiki to support HTTP and HTTPS while serving the same HTML for both, which means the parser cache doesn't have to be split.

Examples

 * Setting  to something like   instead of   is now supported.
 * By default, links to your wiki in Squid purges, IRC feeds and e-mail notifications will use HTTP. If you want them to use HTTPS, set $wgInternalServer (for Squid purges) and/or $wgCanonicalServer (for IRC feeds and e-mail notifications) to something like
 * Same for  in the interwiki table
 * Links like  now work
 * This is required because things like  would otherwise break if   is protocol-relative

Stuff!
MediaWiki 1.18 comes with MOAR stuff.