MediaWiki 1.20/wmf1/overview

MediaWiki 1.20wmf1 is the first partial release of MediaWiki 1.20, deployed to Wikimedia sites in April 2012.

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 vision-impaired 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 user 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 Serbian. ( 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.

Updates to extensions
As part of this update, a few extensions which are deployed to Wikimedia sites will also pick up some recent changes.

AbuseFilter:
 * Added message for function "rescape" (MediaWiki:Abusefilter-edit-builder-funcs-rescape)

API Sandbox:
 * Added '=' to boolean parameters, needed for POST requests, see

AntiSpoof:
 * Fix for - MediaWiki:Antispoof-name-illegal should provide information about the illegal and / or blocked characters in / at the wiki

Collection:
 * Fix for - $wgCollectionPODPartners can be set to define alternative or no print-on-demand vendors

FlaggedRevs:
 * Fix for - Narrowed down "review right requires edit right" to just checking edit restrictions, which better aligns with the original point of the check, which is to handle "edit wars" and "review wars". This should work better with the Translate extension.
 * Fix for - Sanity check template/file versions to decide if non-current version inclusion cache is outdated. For the current version, this still relies on page_touched. Also improved cache use a bit for when the revision author is an anon.
 * Cleaned up inconsistent checking of 'edit' permissions to determining 'review' permissions. It is now checked for automatic review checks and not just manual review attempts.
 * Call setRelevantTitle in Special:Stabilization to improve UI context *

LiquidThreads:
 * Attempt to address by making sure data.query.threads[threadId] is defined.

Math:
 * Added experimental MathJax rendering support (can be toggled in user preferences), completely disabled by default
 * Fix for - Empty &lt;math> tag gives UNIQ

Nuke:
 * Fix for - Blocked admins should not be able to access Special:Nuke

OpenSearch:
 * Extended OpenSearchXml to use extracts and images from other extensions such as PageImages and MobileFrontend's excerpt module, both of which produce better results.
 * Fix for - OpenSearchXml first sentences extraction produces bad results. Made extracts at least 100 characters long (configurable).

ProofreadPage:
 * Fix for - A link to the index is missing for single paged documents.
 * Fix for - Links should be coloured only in Index namespace.
 * Fix for - Add step property to the pages tag
 * Fix for - Zoom buttons appear sometimes on the image, sometimes in the toolbar after update to MW 1.19
 * Fix for - Add a show Headers preference. Apply ThomasPT's patch

RenameUser:
 * Add missing message MediaWiki:action-renameuser

SiteMatrix:
 * Fix for - Add localized name of Wikipedia in result set

SpamBlacklist:
 * Other half of fix for ("API spamblocklist error should provide all blocked URLs").

Upload Wizard:
 * Tooltips displayed when clicking the [?] icons should now work again.
 * Toggle arrows are pointing in the correct direction when using a right-to-left language.

Visual Editor sandbox:
 * Updated to the current contentEditable implementation, which is still very fragile but should provide a better user experience in the long run.

WikiLove:
 * Added SVG icon
 * When typing a longer message, the preview button now works without having to click it twice.

WikiEditor:
 * Small improvements to special characters toolbar in Arabic and Hebrew.