Hi everyone,

Stage 0 of our deployment of MediaWiki 1.19 is complete, which is our deployment to "test2". This wiki is actually on the live cluster like any other wiki, which is about as close as it gets to what things are going to be like when we deploy it to production wikis like any others.

Here's the URL: http://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

In fact, all 800 or so wikis run on the same set of Apache servers, whether they are 1.18 or 1.19, which means this isn't a truly isolated test. There's a small chance that we could accidentally break 1.18 wikis in the process of doing this testing. In particular, if you see something to the effect of "Internal 500 error" on any wiki (1.18 or 1.19), please let us know using the instructions here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_maintenance_notice

(basically #wikimedia-tech or the talk page for the notice above)

If all goes well, we should be making our first wave of deployments to 1.19 wikis in about 27 hours. Go forth and test!

Thanks! Rob