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.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation