Wikimedia sites will gradually be upgraded to version 1.19 of MediaWiki over the second half of February 2012.

This article is available in other languages on mediawiki.org.

Wikimedia engineers are putting the final touches to the latest version of MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia and its sister sites. This version, labeled “1.19wmf1″, will be deployed to Wikimedia sites in stages, starting next week.

We’ve recently set up a Beta cluster, replicating a selection of Wikimedia wikis, where Wikimedians have tested the new version and checked that it worked reasonably well with their local wiki’s specific customizations.

Things are looking good, and the current plan is to run the deployment in five stages between February 15th and March 1st, 2012. The schedule may change based on unexpected issues, so you should refer to the MediaWiki 1.19 roadmap for an up-to-date schedule of when your wiki will be affected. (more…)

Major news in January include:

• Tech support for the black-out protesting SOPA & PIPA;
• The successful San Francisco hackathon;
• The release of the official Wikipedia Android app;
• A new beta cluster for Wikimedians to test upcoming software before it’s deployed to production.

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The "Open Advice" book is available for free download, or purchase as print from lulu.com.

The Open Advice book, a collection of essays, stories and lessons learned by members of the Free Software community, is out!

The book was just announced at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting, in Brussels over the week-end.

About 50 authors from many different projects of the free software community were brought together by Lydia Pintscher, the book’s editor, who started the project in early 2011.

A year and 380 pages later, the book is now available, and tries to provide an answer to the question: What’s the key thing you would have liked to know when you started contributing?

Authors answer that question for many topics, ranging from “Writing patches” to “Documentation for Novices”, to business models, conferences, translation, design, and more.

I contributed “Learn from your users”, a chapter on user experience and usability testing. You’ll also recognize other names from the Wikimedia community, like Evan Prodromou, Markus Krötzsch and Felipe Ortega.

You can learn more about the book and the authors on the book’s website.

All the content of the book is released under the same license as Wikipedia, the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.

Check it out! You can download the book for free as a PDF file, order a print from lulu.com if you prefer paper books, or fork the text on GitHub.

I hope you’ll like the book, and it’ll prove useful, whether you’re new to the world of software, or you’re a seasoned contributor already.

Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager

Major news in December include:

• The deployment of WebFonts to select Indic wikis;
• The first developer prototype of the Visual editor;
• A new version of Article Feedback being tested on the English Wikipedia;
• Progress on the Swift media storage project.

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Major news in November include:

• The completion of the Coding challenge, and two coding events in India and the UK;
• Continued infrastructure work in our data centers to improve performance and reliability, and on the Labs project;
• Progress on the Visual editor and its back-end;
• New versions of the Feedback Dashboard and the Upload Wizard, bringing new and long-awaited features;
• Fundraising engineering going full-swing, in parallel with the annual fundraising campaign;
• The final release of MediaWiki 1.18.0.

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Major news in October include:

• The New Orleans hackathon, which focused on Wikimedia’s infrastructure;
• Native HTTPS support on all Wikimedia sites;
• Progress on the Visual editor project, with the first prototype expected in the coming months;
• The deployment of the Translate extension to meta-wiki;
• The deployment of MediaWiki 1.18 to all Wikimedia sites;
• The completion of the first revision of the MediaWiki architecture document;
• The ramp-up by the fundraising engineering team, to prepare for the upcoming annual fundraiser.

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Major news in September include:

• The deployment of protocol-relative URLs, paving the way for native HTTPS;
• Major progress by our new Internationalization & localization team;
• The deployment of our new mobile front-end, now the default mobile experience;
• The start of the deployment of MediaWiki 1.18 to Wikimedia sites;
• The completion of the Google Summer of Code project;
• Ongoing preparation for the upcoming coding events in the USA, the UK, India and online;
• A revamped, and now maintained, roadmap for Wikimedia engineering efforts.

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Major news in August include:

• Technical discussions at Wikimania and Developer Days;
• Progress on HTTPS, and generally better processes in Operations;
• The kick-off of the Internationalization and localization tools project;
• New features in UploadWizard, including major work on customized campaigns for the Wiki Loves Monuments event;
• MediaWiki 1.18 and the new Mobile platform approaching deployment readiness;

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The AbuseFilter extension for MediaWiki, which helps prevent vandalism on wikis, will be globally enabled on all Wikimedia projects later today.

AbuseFilter was developed by Andrew Garrett with support from the Wikimedia Foundation; it was first enabled on the English Wikipedia in March 2009.

Since then, many local wiki communities have asked individually for AbuseFilter to be turned on on their wiki. As of July 2011, AbuseFilter was already enabled on 66 wikis, out of the 843 wikis the Wikimedia Foundation hosts.

It recently appeared it would just be simpler to enable AbuseFilter by default on all wikis, rather than doing it on request.

When enabled, AbuseFilter comes with no built-in default filters, so no immediate change will be visible on wikis where it is enabled.

Contrary to other anti-vandalism tools, AbuseFilter works by analyzing edits before they’re saved, rather than trying to identify (and revert) them after the fact.

Filters, or “rules”, can be added to AbuseFilter to identify certain kinds of edits matching a pattern. Actions can be taken for these edits, like tagging the edit, preventing the user from saving the page, or even automatically blocking the user. The AbuseFilter documentation provides the format in which filters must be written.

AbuseFilter catches abusive edits matching defined patterns.

Because AbuseFilter has been in use on the English Wikipedia for more than two years, more details about how AbuseFilter works are available in their documentation; Instructions on how to create a filter are also available.

It is possible to export filters from a wiki, and to import them into another one.

AbuseFilter is an extremely powerful tool, with the potential of preventing edits, blocking users, and making a whole wiki unusable. Therefore, it must be used with extreme caution; filters should only be created and edited by administrators who understand their purpose and syntax.

AbuseFilter can also be used to identify edits that are not abusive, for tracking purposes. Tags can be automatically added to edits matching a certain pattern, thus giving editors and patrollers a heads-up about certain edits (see examples).

Because such tags can also be used to identify legit edits, AbuseFilter is sometimes referred to as “Edit filter”.

AbuseFilter offers the possibility for certain filters to be private, to prevent long-time abusers from knowing how their edits are being identified.

We hope this tool will prove useful to our community of editors and patrollers.

Guillaume Paumier
Technical communications manager

Major news in July include:

• Ongoing data replication from our primary Florida data center to our new Virginia data center;
• The deployment of the Article Feedback feature to all articles on the English Wikipedia, and the deployment of MoodBar;
• The successful implementation of a MySQL-based parser cache on Wikimedia wikis;
• Mid-term evaluation of our Summer of Code projects.

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