Trumble, Joyce wrote:
Hello, all.
I am planning a revamp and upgrade of an enterprise wiki jumping from 1.4.4 to 1.13. Management would like a "summary of significant changes" that will benefit the users and administrators. It is a very subjective question and combing through each of the release notes documents to garner the requested information will be time consuming. That said, I don't know of a more effective way to tackle the request. Does there exist, for the major releases, a summary of user-facing improvements? Searching the archives for "release notes" or "upgrades," while interesting reading, did not quite hit the target for me.
Best regards--
Joyce Trumble
Last version is 1.13.1. No reason to update to 1.13 instead.
You should start by viewing the relese notes (changelog) http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/tags/REL1_13_1/phase3/RELEASE-NOTE...
From the 1.4 series there're lots of improvements, including some code injecting and a big schema change at 1.5. Users will notice changes in the skin. Special:Preferences is now different, and account creation is no longer in the same screen as logging in. You can expect a better performance. Users will now be able to use parserfunctions, which are quite useful for templating. There's now a undo link, handy for undoing vandalism. Now there're things such as __HIDDENCAT__ Logs are shown on some places where they are likely to be useful.
Maybe the easiest would be to grab one of your users and ask them to list differences between that wiki and wikipedia :P