The developers of MediaWiki, the software Wikimedia sites run on, are wrapping up work on a new version, with hundreds of improvements and bugfixes. Description:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.19

There is a draft schedule for deploying this software to all Wikimedia sites in February and March. The schedule is tentative and dates are going to shift and change. (See the "SCHEDULING" note below in this email.)

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.19/Roadmap

We want to do a lot of testing BEFORE the rollout, so that we catch potential problems before they affect readers and editors. Please help us! We have set up replicas of your wikis and installed the latest MediaWiki code on those replicas, so you can spot new problems in the software's behavior:

http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org

Please look at http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix and find wikis to test. Try reading, editing, and so on as you normally would; treat it as a giant sandbox. If you find a problem, please report it here: http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Problem_reports

We are especially interested in finding out about problems that affect unique JavaScript user scripts or Gadgets, so we can help you fix them.

SCHEDULING: Now is also a good time to let us know if there are going to be big news days or weeks in February where your community would be especially unhappy if you had a window with no access or no editability. For example, if there's an important national election happening in one of the countries you serve, we'd ideally like to avoid taking your site down for maintenance on that day. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:MediaWiki_1.19/Roadmap would be a good place to tell us that.

If you have questions, please feel free to contact us in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_on_IRC or via the Wikimedia developers' mailing list at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l .

Thank you.