User:GhostInTheMachine/Short descriptions 2020-10-13

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 * xref Wikipedia_talk:Short_description
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On 13 October 2020, there was a tiny but highly significant change to the English Wikipedia. The effects of the change was discovered by various editors the following day.

This is an attempt at a technical summary of the change.


 * Health warning
 * Not many people will want to work through all of the details. The Important Bits are highlighted with a.


 * But
 * There is little value in spending time looking into something unless you tell others what you found


 * 2020-08-04
 * Phabricator ticket T259622 is created
 * System Administrator disables Wikidata fallback for article descriptions
 * This ticket covers the work to be done to add a flag that


 * 2020-09-21
 * Phabricator ticket T263493 is created
 * Reader gets appropriate article short description in search results


 * 2020-09-29 (a Tuesday)
 * Version wmf.11 of the MediaWiki software is deployed to the Wikimedia test sites (Group 0) as part of the standard weekly deployment cycle
 * The changes causes issues — See T263177 for all of the details


 * 2020-09-30 (Wednesday)
 * The wmf.11 change is rolled back


 * 2020-10-01 (Thursday)
 * The software causing the error is altered and re-deployed to a limited set of wikis


 * 2020-10-13
 * Version MediaWiki 1.36/wmf.11