2,463 votes were cast by Wikimedians to decide the fifth annual Picture of the Year in the recent competition on the Wikimedia Commons.   All 783 pictures promoted to featured picture status in the previous year were included in the competition.  The organizing committee is pleased to announce the results, and would like to congratulate our winners.  Below are the winning images:

#1 - 241 votes in the final round | In mid-August 2010 ESO Photo Ambassador Yuri Beletsky snapped this amazing photo at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. A group of astronomers were observing the center of the Milky Way using the laser guide star facility at Yepun, one of the four Unit Telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT). (POTD) Credit: Yuri Beletsky

#2 - 180 votes in the final round | Stari Most, the "Old Bridge", which connects the two banks of river Neretva, has been a symbol of Mostar for centuries. This view from north shows Helebija tower to the left and Tara tower to the right. It was made from the minaret of Koski Mehmed Pasha Mosque. (POTD) Credit: Own work by Ramirez .

#3 - 170 votes in the final round | Sarychev Peak Volcano erupts June 12, 2009, on Matua Island (North Kuril Islands) (POTD) Credit: Original photo by NASA, uploaded on flickr by user John, derivative work by The High Fin Sperm Whale

The complete results are visible on the 2010 results page. The competition consisted of two voting rounds—Round 1 ended May 4th and Round 2 ended on June 7th. The Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest is an annual volunteer-led contest, running since 2006.  This year, more than 1,500 Wikimedians voted in the competition, a record turnout that exceeded the organizing committee’s goals.  The support of the Wikimedia community made this possible, and the organizers would like to thank everyone who participated.

The Wikimedia Commons is a media repository hosting content that anyone can share, reuse, and remix.  Wikimedia Commons editors nominate the best media for featured status in an ongoing project, and all featured pictures from the previous year are included in the annual Picture of the Year contest. The contest is a fun and enjoyable event that not only celebrates our excellent photographers and illustrators, but everyone who contributes to Wikimedia.  You are encouraged to donate your own work to the Wikimedia Commons as our library of freely licensed media files grows past 10,000,000 files. You can upload them yourself (details here) or email info-commons@wikimedia.org if you are the copyright-holder or maintainer of a freely-licensed media collection that you would like to donate to the Commons.

Post authored by: User: mono

Picture of the Year Organizing Team

(The following is the first installment in a series of weekly updates from the WikiHistories summer research fellows, who will be studying the history of different non-English Wikipedia editing communities and publishing their findings over the course of the summer. Community members and translators: please see the project page on Meta if you’re interested in helping out!)

Less than two days after arriving in the Philippines, I found myself at the Wikimedia Philippines headquarters in Makati, Metro Manila on June 18 with members of its Board of Trustees and two representatives from the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (Commission on Philippine Language), Cherry Mae Tadeo and Jomar Cañega, to observe a meeting that was largely aimed at determining whether Tagalog Wikipedia’s language policies meet with the commission’s approval.

Wikimedia Philippines and Language Commission Hard at Work: (L to R) Officers and Members Butch Bustria, Roel Balingit, Josh Lim, Eric Andrada-Calica, and Jojit Ballesteros; Commission Representatives Jomar Cañega and Cherry Mae Tadeo.

I myself have not had a long history with Wikipedia. But from what I gathered at a three-day workshop at Wikimedia Headquarters in San Francisco right before my trip, English Wikipedians may find this unusual. Wikimedia Philippines, of their own accord and without pressure from the commission, was essentially asking for government approval of Tagalog Wikipedia’s language policies. This signals a greater tendency not only for collaboration at least among the Wikimedia Philippines top brass, but also for that body to take cues from established entities such as the government, universities, as well as other Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects.

Another key difference between the English and Tagaog Wikipedia movements is that there is significant overlap between Wikimedians and Wikipedians in this context. Josh Lim and Jojit Ballesteros, President and Vice-President of Wikimedia Philippines respectively, are also two of Tagalog Wikipedia’s most active editors. Eric Andrada-Calica, Tagalog Wikipedia’s first administrator, is a Wikimedia Philippines member and was also present at the meeting.

Thus, what would traditionally be a separation between a Wikimedia issue of whether Tagalog Wikipedia’s language policies conforms to government standards easily overlaps with the Wikipedia question of how those policies can be improved to best serve the needs of Tagalog Wikipedia readers. As much as Wikimedia Philippines has absorbed the rhetoric of English Wikimedia and says that it does not involve itself with the content of Tagalog Wikipedia, it is certainly clear that it involves itself with the forms of language that are used to render that content, which arguably overlaps with the content itself.

For readers unfamiliar with the Philippine language debate, a good place to start is the English Wikipedia entry on Filipino language, which details the history of Filipino and its distinction from Tagalog. The crux of the debate over language purity stems from the country’s history of double-colonization, first by the Spanish and then by the Americans. The use of loanwords from Spanish and English are therefore discouraged by some sectors of Philippine society, because it signals a continued dependence on that colonial past. However, new technologies and the teaching of English in schools tends to make loanwords more readily available to many Filipinos than purer terms. One example discussed at the meeting is the use of “seatbelt” rather than the Tagalog term “sinturong pangkaligtasan” (belt for safety), used by airlines in official announcements but not in daily speech.*

Cañega makes a particularly impassioned point.

In a Western context, language commissions most immediately recall governing bodies that try to preserve language purity, so it was ironic to hear that Tagalog Wikipedia’s language policies are actually more rather than less pure than what the commission recommends. As Cañeda noted during the meeting: “It is not linguists who determine how language is used. It is the people who do.” Thus, when Cañeda reviewed Tagalog Wikipedia’s language policies, he noted that they were in relative keeping with the commission’s guidelines — not because they maintained Tagalog language purity, but because they include a policy that provides more common terms in parenthesis whenever a more obscure or “purer” term is used.

This was not always the case for Tagalog Wikipedia, which started out significantly less formally, with many English loanwords peppering even its front page and basic terms. As an example, the term for editing a page used to be “i-edit,” a combination of a Tagalog prefix and an English verb, before it was changed to “baguhin,” a word that is purely Tagalog but may be less comprehensible to many Filipinos whose language of school instruction is English. Between 2006-2007, a period that I plan to investigate more closely, more stringent and uniform language policies were implemented. There were a number of references during the meeting to contributors who were alienated when their articles were edited into “purer” Tagalog, which I also plan to follow up on as I conduct interviews and research Tagalog Wikipedia pages.

Wikimedia Philippines President Josh Lim, with Vice-President Jojit Ballesteros in the mirror behind him.

In response to the question of why these language policies were adopted, Wikimedia Philippines president Josh Lim expressed a need for Tagalog Wikipedia to be seen as reputable especially by academic institutions, once again signaling a concern that departs from English Wikipedia. For better or for worse, Tagalog Wikipedia seems less inclined to establish its own autonomous and independent policies and parameters, and is more likely to collaborate with other entities or look at other established sources for guidance.

However, there is also support within the organization for more liberal language policies. This feeling was articulated most assertively during the meeting by Wikimedia Philippines Treasurer Roel Balingit, who expressed concern that the more academic and purist tone the site currently leans towards risks intimidating and alienating potential editors and contributors.

This comment points to an important research direction in relation to Tagalog Wikipedia, of determining if there have been any changes in editor and contributor activity since the stricter language policies were adopted, which points to a broader question of whether stricter policies in general have a tendency to alienate potential editors and contributors. Regardless, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight in terms of the debate regarding Tagalog Wikipedia’s language policies, which itself mirrors the  indefinite discussion of language in the Philippines in general.

Meredith Ramirez Talusan
Wikimedia Summer Fellow and
PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature, Cornell University

* Attentive readers may note that “sinturon” itself comes from the Spanish “cinturon,” which signals another language complication in the Philippines since Spanish tends to be prioritized over English when the use of a loanword becomes necessary. This is perceived as an aesthetic issue, because Spanish more easily adapts to Tagalog/Filipino spelling norms and its vowel system also integrates well with the indigenous language compared to English.

In this guest post, Dominic McDevit-Parks, User:Dominic, reports on his work as the first Wikipedian in Residence at the National Archives and Records Administration. A Wikipedia contributor since 2004, Dominic is studying history and archives management at Simmons College.

Ansel Adams, 1941

In the 1940s, Ansel Adams, the famous American landscape photographer, was commissioned by the US Department of the Interior to photograph the country’s national parks. As a result, these photographs by a major 20th-century artist entered the public domain as federal works, and eventually became part of the records held by the National Archives and Records Administration. However, despite the fact that these photographs are part of the world’s shared cultural heritage, they had never truly been freely accessible to the public in all their glory. For decades, they were simply a physical collection of prints housed in the National Archives, until the late 1990s when the National Archives digitized the photos as part of its Electronic Access Project. They made their way into the National Archives’ catalog, were given an online finding aid, and were placed into their own Flickr album. In these three cases the images made public were scaled-down versions made for the web. They were, however, accompanied by advertisements encouraging interested users to purchase high-quality prints of the photos, and presumably this potential source of income served as a deterrent for releasing high-resolution digital scans. This tale should teach us an important lesson: that the public domain is not always public—even (sometimes especially) for works of incredible historical and artistic merit like these.

For Ansel Adams, there is a happy ending. The current incarnation of the National Archives, especially under the stewardship of David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, has signalled a deep commitment to openness and free digital access to its holdings. It is also incredibly friendly to the cause of Wikimedia. One of the first things we worked on when I joined the National Archives as their Wikipedian in Residence was freeing the Ansel Adams collection, and this is something that they were very eager to accomplish. You can see all 220 photos now, in high resolution, on Wikimedia Commons, and the original TIFF files from the scans are going to be available soon. This is not a special case, though; the National Archives has put no restrictions on what we can obtain from their already-digitized files, and they would even like to work with any scanning volunteers to help digitize more.

I would also like to emphasize to the Wikimedia community that this is a two-way street. The National Archives can cooperate with Wikimedia because we share common goals like open access and public education, but they are reaching out specifically to us because we are in a unique position to add value to their holdings. We need to demonstrate our seriousness by following through as a community. This means incorporating new, high-quality images from the National Archives into Wikipedia articles so they don’t just languish unused and undiscovered, fully categorizing them on Commons, digitally restoring historical images, working to transcribe them on Wikisource, and even creating new content on Wikipedia to accompany and enrich National Archives documents. We can start this effort with Ansel Adams—and I encourage you to get involved with that project—but this is also hopefully only the beginning of a very fruitful collaboration.

You can get involved in the various projects at WP:NARA, WS:NARA, and COM:NARA.

Dominic McDevit-Parks
Wikipedian in Residence, National Archives and Records Administration

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Wikipedia Participation Challenge, a data modeling competition to develop an algorithm that predicts future editing activity on Wikipedia. The competition is hosted by Kaggle, a platform for data modeling and prediction competitions.  The Participation Challenge is open to community members and anyone else who is interested in analyzing Wikipedia data.  This is the first of two data competitions the Wikimedia Foundation will sponsor this year.

The goal of this competition is to gain a better understanding of the factors that encourage or discourage people from editing Wikipedia. Increasing the number of active editors is one of our strategic priorities. Both the Wikipedia communities and the Wikimedia Foundation stand to benefit from models that quantify the factors that determine whether a Wikipedia editor is likely to continue contributing. The competition asks contestants to develop a model to predict the number of edits a given editor will make in six month’s time.

The data used in this competition comes from the publicly available English Wikipedia XML data dump.  An anonymous donor has generously contributed $10,000 as prize money. There will be a Grand Prize for the best prediction, as well as special prizes awarded for the use of open source software. The Grand Prize winner will also be given the opportunity to present their prediction model at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining.  The competition starts today and will continue until September 20, 2011.

Head over to our competition portal, download the data, and start crunching the data! And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter: #wikichallenge and @dvanliere.

Howie Fung
Senior Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Diederik van Liere
Research Consultant, Wikimedia Foundation

We all like to feel valued. According to the 2011 survey of Wikipedia editors (see top-line data), among 17 variables, “being looked down on by more experienced editors” is the most likely to cause people to say they will edit less frequently (69% agreement), while “having others compliment you on your edits/articles” is the most likely to cause people to say they will edit more frequently (78% agreement).

On the other hand, editing Wikipedia has tended to become harder over time, and the likelihood that new users will receive correction/criticism has increased. This is reflected by various efforts to code and analyze the experience of new users, such as the recent Newbie teaching strategy research sprint undertaken within the scope of our Summer of Research.

Warnings, teaching and criticism tend to dominate the experience of new users

This chart shows the relative increase and decrease in warning messages, praise/thank you messages, criticism and teaching messages over time.

The drive for quality and reliability has led to the development of sophisticated automation mechanisms that aid in socializing new users to Wikipedia’s norms, policies and conventions. The act of expressing appreciation for other users, by contrast, is a largely manual effort. Whether it’s welcoming new users, inviting users to participate in specific topics or discussions, recognizing effort using barnstars and trophies, or just sending a whimsical note, expressing appreciation is not an activity that is facilitated by the software — in spite of its known importance for people’s likelihood to want to edit.

WikiLove is a simple experiment in appreciation. It makes it easy and fun to send barnstars or whimsical messages of appreciation to other users. The tool was first built by Wikimedia Foundation developer and Wikimedian Ryan Kaldari as a small gadget, and the new editor engagement team at the Wikimedia Foundation has developed it into a full feature over the last few weeks.

WikiLove is invoked from a user page by clicking the "Heart" icon.

How you can help

Currently, the Wikilove extension is only deployed on our prototype site.  While it’s a simple feature, we would still appreciate your help in testing and evaluating it.  To do so, create a test account on prototype (please remember to check the “remember me for 30-days” box — sorry, there is a known bug on prototype that requires the box to be checked).  Once your test account created and you are logged in, visit any userpage or user talk page.  You will notice a red heart icon to the left of the search box.  Click on the icon, send WikiLove, and let us know what you think by providing feedback on the WikiLove talk page.

WikiLove comes with different forms of appreciation, and can be customized further by every wiki community

What’s next

Our plan is to enable WikiLove on the English Wikipedia on June 29 (we may push the date depending on any issues surfaced). Users will be able to disable the WikiLove feature by going to My Preferences → Editing → Labs Features and unchecking the box that is labeled “Enable showing appreciation for other users with the WikiLove tab (experimental)”.

The tool has built-in tables that will help us measure how frequently WikiLove is used, and allow us to understand whether its usage actually affects (new) editor activity. Irrespective of that, we’re also interested in exploring tools specifically built for welcoming new users and inviting them to edit articles related to their expressed interests.

We’re not presupposing that we know how appreciation can best be expressed in the many different languages and cultures that make up the Wikimedia community. The selection of barnstars and other forms of appreciation that we’re starting with is just that — a selection. Wiki administrators will be able to modify the user interface by following the instructions for customization — so that whether you want to award gifts of chocolate or stroopwafels or baklava, you can do so!

Howie Fung
Senior Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

There are more bilingual and multilingual individuals in the world than there are monolingual, and the global community of Wikipedia editors is no exception.  According to the Editors Survey, April 2011, over half of Wikipedia editors contribute to more than one language Wikipedia, and an overwhelming majority (72%) read Wikipedia in more than one language.

Number of languages to which editors contribute

Number of Wikipedia languages which editors read

In addition, with an overwhelming majority of Wikipedia editors reading and editing English Wikipedia, English Wikipedia gets a lot of attention from Wikipedia editors. English Wikipedia has the largest and most diverse pool of editors with editors from other projects contributing to English Wikipedia. In total 76% of Wikipedia editors contribute to English Wikipedia, although only 40 percent primarily contribute to English Wikipedia.  93 percent of Wikipedia editors read English Wikipedia at some level, and about half  (49%) of them primarily read English Wikipedia. We can clearly see that editors who work primarily in other language projects are helping English Wikipedia grow.

Percent who contribute/primarily contribute to the following languages

Percent who read/primarily read the following languages

We’ll have a few more blog post insights from the Wikipedia Editors survey next week.

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

(This is the third in series of blog posts exploring insights from the April 2011 Editors Survey)

Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed an amicus (“friends of the court”) brief in Golan v. Holder, a case of great importance before the Supreme Court that will affect our understanding of the public domain for years to come. The EFF is representing the Wikimedia Foundation in addition to the American Association of Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, the University of Michigan Dean of Libraries, and the Internet Archive.

This case raises critical issues as to whether Congress may withdraw works from the public domain and throw them back under a copyright regime.  In 1994, in response to the U.S. joining of the Berne Convention, Congress granted copyright protection to a large body of foreign works that the Copyright Act had previously placed in the public domain.  Affected cultural goods probably number in the millions, including, for example, Metropolis (1927), The Third Man (1949), Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, music by Stravinsky, paintings by Picasso, drawings by M.C. Escher, films by Fellini, Hitchcock, and Renoir, and writings by George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

The petitioners are orchestra conductors, educators, performers, film archivists, and motion picture distributors who depend upon the public domain for their livelihood.  They filed suit in 2001, pointing out that Congress exceeded its power under the Copyright Clause and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  They eventually won at the district court level, but that decision was overturned on appeal in the Tenth Circuit.   The U.S. Supreme Court – which rarely grants review – did so here.

Petitioners filed their brief last week, and you can find it here. We are expecting a number of parties to file “friends of the court” briefs.   The EFF’s brief can be found here.

The Wikimedia Foundation joined the EFF brief in light of the tremendously important role that the public domain plays in our mission to “collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.”  We host millions of works in the public domain and are dependent on thousands of volunteers to search out and archive these works.  Wikimedia Commons alone boasts approximately 3 million items in these cultural commons.  To put it bluntly, Congress cannot be permitted the power to remove such works from the public domain whenever it finds it suitable to do so.  It is not right – legally or morally.   The Copyright Clause expressly requires limits on copyright terms.  The First Amendment disallows theft from the creative commons.  Such works belong to our global knowledge.  For this reason, we join with the EFF and many others to encourage the Court to overturn a law that so threatens our public domain - not only with respect to the particular works at issue but also with respect to the bad precedent such a law would set for the future.

We anticipate the Court will reach a decision sometime before July 2012.

Geoff Brigham
General Counsel, Wikimedia Foundation

When people research a topic for school, work or personal interest, they often turn to Wikipedia as their starting point. Many of those visitors then continue their research by following one of the millions of footnotes to the original resources held in libraries around the world that are used to verify Wikipedia’s content. This is a symbiotic relationship – Wikipedia becomes more reliable and libraries’ treasures are made more accessible.

Many librarians are also eager to hear how they can work with Wikipedia more – which is why the Wikimedia Foundation is speaking at two events this weekend. Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner will be delivering the president’s program address at the American Library Association conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. On the same day, Cultural Partnerships Fellow Liam Wyatt will be a keynote speaker at the EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) General Assembly in Minsk, Belarus. EIFL is a group dedicated to supporting libraries in developing countries.

"The Librarian", 1566, by Arcimboldo, Skokloster Castle, Sweden

“Libraries are, ultimately, about helping people find the information they need,” says Rachel Slough, the teaching and learning librarian at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. “Wikipedia often has that information. Both libraries and Wikipedia support learning and the efficient dissemination of accurate information. In academic libraries, there is an emphasis on the teaching roles of libraries; Wikipedia supports and enhances that mission.”

Rachel is one of a handful of university library staff serving as Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors. Campus Ambassadors are trained on teaching newcomers how to contribute content to Wikipedia, either as students whose professor assigns them to edit an article for class or as people on campus who want to share what they know with the world.

Librarians are a natural fit for this role. They have been urging students for years to start with a reference like Wikipedia that can provide a general overview of a research topic and a list of sources at the bottom – and then use that source list to dig deeper into the topic.

“You need to start where the students are at and bring them along to appropriate scholarly resources,” says Tony Garrett, a Campus Ambassador who is the head of reference and access services at Troy University.

Rachel agrees. She works in a freshman residence hall teaching students about the library, and she says she’ll often use Wikipedia as a hook to grab students’ attention. Wikipedia, she says, is a part of students’ reality, so it’s something familiar.

“Part of effective service in any profession is being accountable and authentic with those we serve,” Rachel says. “Wikipedia forces me to challenge my assumptions, to meet my users where they are, and to embrace the changing information landscape.”

Many libraries are also reaching out to Wikimedia projects in the form of partnerships with Wikimedia Chapters. The GLAM-WIKI program (GLAM is an acronym for Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) connects institutions like libraries with people in the Wikimedia movement to build on the symbiotic relationship between the two communities. To name just a few library-related programs:

• Wikimedia France has partnered with the Bibliotheque National de France on a project in which the French national library provides high-quality scans of old documents, which are placed on Wikimedia Commons and transcribed on Wikisource.
• The British Library has hosted several “edit-a-thon” workshops with Wikimedia UK. Specialist librarians from the British Library, who have access to the original materials in the collection, work alongside Wikimedians in private reading rooms.
• The National Library of Australia‘s digitized newspaper search engine allows users to easily obtain code to create a footnote in Wikipedia simply by clicking “cite” in any article in any edition of any newspaper.

The Wikimedia Foundation will also have a booth at the exhibit hall at the American Library Association conference. If you’re at either the EIFL or the ALA this weekend, come talk with us about how libraries can have a proactive and mutually-beneficial relationship with Wikimedia projects.

–
LiAnna Davis, Communications Associate, Public Policy Initiative
Liam Wyatt, Cultural Partnerships Fellow

We are proud to announce the first stable release of the 1.17 series.

• Download MediaWiki 1.17.0

MediaWiki 1.17 is a very large release that contains many new features and bug fixes. This is a summary of the major changes of interest to users. You can consult the release notes for the full list of changes in this version.

What’s new?

PHP 5.2.3

We now require PHP version 5.2.3 or later. Why? Well, it brings with it some tools for your beloved developers. It was released on June 1, 2007, so we believe this requirement will not be a hassle for administrators. Be sure to check your PHP installation and contact your host if it runs an outdated PHP version.

New installer

The installer now supports many languages!

MediaWiki 1.17 is shipping with a completely redesigned installer to fix a lot of outstanding bugs, clean up the code quality, and make it easier to use. Notably, you can now run upgrades from the web without having to move LocalSettings.php. A couple of other notable changes:

• The installer can now be fully localized like the rest of the software and contains numerous help dialogs.
• The installer script directory has been renamed from config/ to mw-config/.
• You now download your generated LocalSettings.php at install completion, rather than writing it straight to the configuration directory. The previous behavior was a security risk.
• IBM DB2 and MSSQL support were dropped from the installer.

ResourceLoader

As web browsers have become more capable, the software that MediaWiki runs on them has become more complex. This trend has resulted in developers needing an efficient way to package and deliver code to web browsers.  To address this, MediaWiki 1.17 ships with ResourceLoader: a framework which combines and minifies CSS and JavaScript before delivering them to the web browser.  ResourceLoader improves performance, while also making it easier to write client-side features.  ResourceLoader allows developers to organize scripts, styles, and messages into named modules. Any number of modules can be loaded through a single request, improving page load times. Code is minified automatically and loaded when needed, reducing unnecessary downloads. Other advanced features include the ability embed images in style sheets using data URIs, or automatically flipping horizontal information in style sheets for right-to-left user interfaces.

Category sorting

Category sorting has been drastically improved.

• Sorting is now case insensitive.
• Sub-categories, pages and files can now be paged separately.
• When several pages are given the same sort key, they sort by their names instead of randomly.

Language support

As with every release, MediaWiki 1.17 brings improved support for languages in MediaWiki, with improved translation and features for the many supported languages.

New languages:

• Moroccan Spoken Arabic (ary)
• Banjar (bjn)
• Kabardian (Cyrillic) (kbd-cyrl)
• Latgalian (ltg)
• Minangkabau (min)
• Dutch (informal) (nl-informal)
• Rusyn (rue)

API

API bug fixes and new features have been added to 1.17, providing more options for input and output.

• API output can now be formatted by PHP’s var_export() (format type is dbg/dbgfm).
• An API module was added to list page properties.
• PARAM_REQUIRED can now be used on parameters, to have the API enforce existence before code even reaches the module.
• The API now has a Really Simple Discovery module, useful for publishing service information by the API.

API breaking changes

The API contains 3 breaking changes against previous releases:

• action=patrol now requires POST.
• The patrol token is no longer the same as edit token.
• Session keys returned by ApiUpload are now strings instead of integers.

Other

• Interwiki links in articles are now recorded in a separate table.
• Users can now add CSS and JS to all skins by using User:<name>/common.css and User:<name>/common.js.
• Oracle Database support has been improved, and is now ready for beta testing. If you work in an environment where Oracle is readily available, and you can’t get access to MySQL, this may be a useful alternative for you. Please try it out and let us know if it works for you. Oracle support is not yet recommended for use in production.

This blog post is based on the MediaWiki 1.17 wiki page on www.mediawiki.org, which was collaboratively edited. Please see the page history for credits.