In putting together the tarball for 1.20, I had some trouble with creating an announcement for the release that captured the really significant changes that third party users of MediaWiki should know about. I hope that I can work with the developers to make this announcement for 1.21 more informative while remaining concise.
Yes, we have the RELEASE-NOTES file, but this is really too big to be easily comprehended by the average user of MediaWiki and it is too big for me to scan and synthesize in the limited amount of time that I have.
I'd like to find a way to come up with something like https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.18 for every release. Or, at least better than what we currently have at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.20.
At the same time, I don't want to impose an onerous burden on developers, so I'd like to figure out how to keep the the MediaWiki_1.21 page up to date as we go along.
One idea I had was scanning the changes in RELEASE-NOTES on a, say, weekly basis and updating the current MediaWiki_X.xx page.
Another was asking code reviewers to somehow flag commits in Gerrit as a signal for a volunteer (like me) to add it to the current MediaWiki_X.xx page: "Hey! this really should get more attention."
But these are just my ideas right now. I'm open to suggestions for how to improve the release process for MediaWiki.
(Oh, and if you know of something that the average user of MediaWiki should really know, but that isn't yet included on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.20, then, please, update the page.)