We have now deployed MediaWiki 1.18 to several wikis, to shake out bugs before deploying it to the largest and highest-trafficked wikis. More details are below and at http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/16/mediawiki118iscomin/ . Major improvements in MediaWiki 1.18 include: * Support for gender-specific user pages: languages that have different words for User whether the user is male or female will be able to show the male or the female version, if the user has specified their gender in their preferences. * Better directionality support: MediaWiki 1.18 will make it easier for left-to-right and right-to-left text to coexist on the same page. (Languages this affects include Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi.) * Protocol-relative URLs, which will allow a wiki to support HTTP and HTTPS while serving the same HTML for both, thus avoiding a split in the parser cache. We've now completed stage 2 of the deployment, deploying the new software to meta.wikimedia.org, en.wikiquote.org, en.wikibooks.org, beta.wikiversity.org, eo.wikipedia.org, nl.wikipedia.org, and incubator.wikimedia.org. We're set to upgrade the remaining wikis by Tuesday, October 4, 23:00-03:00 UTC, so if there are any major bugs, we would like to find them before then! Please help, and please spread the word. I've started gathering some test cases at: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Sumanah/1.18_test_cases with ideas of things that need to be tested. Please feel free to add to that list and to run those tests on various browsers, including on mobile devices. If you need help filing a bug, please feel free to email me or to find me on IRC; I'm sumanah on Freenode. Thank you. -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Wikitech-l] Stage 1 of the 1.18 deployment done Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 23:03:19 -0700 From: Rob Lanphier <robla(a)wikimedia.org> Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Hi everyone, Stage 1 of the MediaWiki 1.18 deployment is complete. We've deployed to the following wikis: * he.wikisource.org * mediawiki.org * simple.wikipedia.org * simple.wiktionary.org * strategy.wikimedia.org * usability.wikimedia.org The deployment had a few bumps (mainly problems with LiquidThreads, which we reverted to 1.17), but mostly went well. We started late due to getting a last-minute adjustment to the Resource Loader/Het Deploy compatibility fix in. You can see some of the last minute changes we made here: http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?path=branches%2Fwmf%2F1.18wmf1&tit… ...as well as logs of major changes to the cluster last night here: http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Server_admin_log Thanks to all involved! Next step is Stage 2 on Monday. More details about the 1.18 deployment generally are here: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/16/mediawiki118iscomin/ Rob _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l