[Wikitech-ambassadors] MediaWiki 1.18 deployment in test stages - please help test

[Sumana Harihareswara]

We have now deployed MediaWiki 1.18 to several wikis, to shake out bugs
before deploying it to the largest and highest-trafficked wikis.  More
details are below and at
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/16/mediawiki118iscomin/ .

Major improvements in MediaWiki 1.18 include:

*    Support for gender-specific user pages: languages that have
different words for User whether the user is male or female will be able
to show the male or the female version, if the user has specified their
gender in their preferences.
*    Better directionality support: MediaWiki 1.18 will make it easier
for left-to-right and right-to-left text to coexist on the same page.
(Languages this affects include Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi.)
*    Protocol-relative URLs, which will allow a wiki to support HTTP and
HTTPS while serving the same HTML for both, thus avoiding a split in the
parser cache.

We've now completed stage 2 of the deployment, deploying the new
software to meta.wikimedia.org, en.wikiquote.org, en.wikibooks.org,
beta.wikiversity.org, eo.wikipedia.org, nl.wikipedia.org, and
incubator.wikimedia.org.  We're set to upgrade the remaining wikis by
Tuesday, October 4, 23:00-03:00 UTC, so if there are any major bugs, we
would like to find them before then!  Please help, and please spread the
word.

I've started gathering some test cases at:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Sumanah/1.18_test_cases

with ideas of things that need to be tested.  Please feel free to add to
that list and to run those tests on various browsers, including on
mobile devices.  If you need help filing a bug, please feel free to
email me or to find me on IRC; I'm sumanah on Freenode.

Thank you.

-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Stage 1 of the 1.18 deployment done
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 23:03:19 -0700
From: Rob Lanphier <robla at wikimedia.org>
Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>

Hi everyone,

Stage 1 of the MediaWiki 1.18 deployment is complete.  We've deployed
to the following wikis:
*  he.wikisource.org
*  mediawiki.org
*  simple.wikipedia.org
*  simple.wiktionary.org
*  strategy.wikimedia.org
*  usability.wikimedia.org

The deployment had a few bumps (mainly problems with LiquidThreads,
which we reverted to 1.17), but mostly went well.  We started late due
to getting a last-minute adjustment to the Resource Loader/Het Deploy
compatibility fix in.

You can see some of the last minute changes we made here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?path=branches%2Fwmf%2F1.18wmf1&title=Special%3ACode%2FMediaWiki

...as well as logs of major changes to the cluster last night here:
http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Server_admin_log

Thanks to all involved!  Next step is Stage 2 on Monday.  More details
about the 1.18 deployment generally are here:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/16/mediawiki118iscomin/

Rob

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