Since Brandon's email a minute ago crossed mine in the ether and did not make it to external lists, I am pasting it here:

On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 1:53 PM, Brandon Black <bblack@wikimedia.org> wrote:
We've merged up https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/214705/1 to address
this, and I've purged the caches to ensure the update is fully live
already.  It should address the issue, assuming that the block on RL's
/w/load.php entry point was the only part of the problem.

On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 1:55 PM, Jon Katz <jkatz@wikimedia.org> wrote:
+external mobile and wikitech

Shoot.  I meant to send this the external list.  For those of you just joining us, we recently got an email from google letting us know that some of our pages are now failing the mobile-friendly test, which has an adverse impact on our search results.  It appears that most of our pages are also blocking style info.

Google doesn't offer much insight into penalties, but if they're sending us the email then it is or will have some impact.  I'd like to see if we can better understand the other side of the equation- what is cost of fixing it?  I think Jon's questions below are the ones to start with.

-J


On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 1:35 PM, Jon Robson <jrobson@wikimedia.org> wrote:

It's all in the report. We block w/ in robots.txt always have.

There have been a bunch of changes to improve performance of the site overall which might have led to that. Mailing this to the public mailing list wikitech would give you a better idea.

Our site /is/ mobile friendly it's just we tell google not to load styles from w/load.php so no need to panic.

The question is what is the penalty of us failing this tool? Does it impact our google search rankings?

Fix is trivial.. Update robots.txt but first the question is why are we blocking scripts and styles on that url?

On 29 May 2015 1:17 pm, "Jon Katz" <jkatz@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Readership team and broader community,
Any changes we might have recently made to cause this warning to appear about googlebot not being able to access our site?
I consider this to be a very serious issue.
The examples below are not mobile, but same issue applies when you try an en.m. version of the pages.  

Best,
Jon


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Wes Moran <wmoran@wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, May 29, 2015 at 12:47 PM
Subject: Mobile Firendly
To: Jon Katz <jkatz@wikimedia.org>
Cc: Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org>


Jon,

Google notified us of the followin...

"We recently noticed that there was a change with how you embed CSS & JS which results in us not being able to use the CSS & JS to recognize what the page looks like. That's making some of your pages fail the mobile-friendly-test, for example. You used to load CSS & JS from bits.wikimedia.org, but now they're loaded through /w/load.php?... directly from the Wikipedia host, where that path is blocked by robots.txt. 

You can see how we render the pages with Fetch as Google in Webmaster Tools / Search Console, you can also see most of that with the test-page at:

Some of the pages still pass the test there (example), but the CSS is broken there too since it's blocked. "

Any ideas what can be causing this?

Regards,
Wes


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