> Interesting how all of them even in Master
> write "This is not a release yet!", seems they
> were never finalized and cleaned.
They were finalized only in the release branches/tags, by the looks of it, as part of the release process. Perhaps "merge changelogs back to master" could be added to it.
> How reliable are they to contain all changes made?
I gather the focus is on end-user visible changes, e.g. new visible features or API changes, especially those which might break existing code.
In particular https://doc.wikimedia.org/Wikibase/master/php/adr_0017.html outlines the release notes template which includes the following difference from MediaWiki release notes:
Don't include "New developer features" or changes to "development-only external libraries"
One main difference between MediaWiki and Wikibase is that Wikibase is an extension to MediaWiki and our external developer community is not as big. To reduce the burden on the team we think it's a good idea
to not include these.