At this point most of our wikis have been upgraded to MediaWiki 1.4,
which has a few spiffy new features, some bug fixes, and some
performance improvements in page rendering.
I'm slating the upgrades for *.wikipedia.org to start around 1 or 2 am
UTC Thursday morning (Wednesday evening in the US). There will be some
read-only time during the conversions, which may last up to a few hours
depending on how cooperative the databases are.
Note that there's an issue with the special character insertion
template on the edit page; on older versions it happened to be possible
to insert raw HTML and JavaScript in that portion of the template but
ongoing cleanup (for security and robustness reasons, outlined in my
recent post to Wiktionary-l) mean that it doesn't work anymore.
It is a useful thing though, and it should be possible to make it work
through alternate means, namely a simple MediaWiki extension module.
I'll try to have one ready around the time of the conversion if
somebody doesn't beat me to it.
Please don't forget to file bug reports at
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org for unresolved problems on the other new
wikis. We might not get to everything immediately, but we'll never be
able to fix problems we don't know about.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)