Is it too late to update the release notes? The changes to scipy.sparse are a little different from what's listed.

The reshape method only worked on LIL matrices, and in-place reshaping did not work on any matrices. Both operations are now implemented for all matrices. Handling of shapes has been made consistent with numpy.matrix throughout the sparse module (shape can be a tuple or splatted, negative number acts as placeholder, padding and unpadding dimensions of size 1 to ensure length-2 shape).