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 Foundation is aiming to deploy improvements as successive improvements within 1.20 (1.20wmf1, 1.20wmf2, and so on). A tarball for third-party users will come out in the summer or fall of 2012 (but they can also stay current by cloning trunk).

What's new?
The comprehensive list of what's new will be in the release notes. But first:

Readers and editors will notice
The biggest thing you'll notice is the new diff style (example). Also, "Show Changes" on default messages now shows a diff against the default message text. (This is useful, because the textbox is already preloaded with the default message text, so it's nice to get the diff against that text.) More polish you'll notice: 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 ).

Some more improvements:


 * Added user talk link on Special:Listusers.
 * 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 extract on non-existent 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.
 * The nosummary option is preserved even when a captcha is shown.
 * CSS classes can be used to change the appearance of a verified email in user preferences.
 * &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.


 * Namespace gender aliases for Albanian languages (sq & aln) and Croatian (hr). ( and )
 * Mizo (lus) added.
 * Localised parentheses are now used in more special pages.
 * When editing a script page on a RTL wiki the textbox should be LTR.
 * Rendering of devanagari numbers in automatic '#' number lists

Under the hood
If you write extensions or administer a MediaWiki installation, you might notice:

We added some features for those power users:
 * The user_token field is now left empty until a user attempts to login and cookies need to be set. It is also now possible to reset every user's user_token simply by clearing the values in the user_token column.
 * Added TitleIsAlwaysKnown hook which gets called when determining if a page exists. **
 * upload_by_url right can be (globally) restricted to given domains * jQuery JSON plugin is now at v2.3.
 * Introduced $wgDebugDBTransactions to trace transaction status (currently PostgreSQL only). **
 * The parser itself is now given as an additional argument to ParserMakeImageParams. **
 * MediaWiki now uses cryptographically random numbers for increased security while generating tokens. (See MWCryptRand.)
 * Option on Special:Prefixindex and Special:Allpages to not show redirects.
 * is now available in addition to since the text from  can change.
 * Special:Version has been updated now that we've switched Git. ( and )
 * #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 ist of fullurl.
 * generateSitemap can now optionally skip redirect pages.
 * get rid of unneeded arguments passed to addOption
 * rename $redirects to $skippedRedirects. Easier to search.
 * easier to read conditional test of page_is_redirect
 * There is now an API (action=tokens) just for getting tokens.

And we fixed some bugs:
 * Use the correct way to construct a log page title.
 * Regenerate an empty user_token and save to the database when we try to set the user's cookies for login.
 * Fixed incorrect hash mismatch errors in the DiffHistoryBlob history compression method.
 * Calling close on a DatabaseBase object now clears the connection.
 * Let ?preloadtitle=foo be passed on to target of 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

 * 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