Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-01/Technology report



2013 saw a lot of changes to MediaWiki software and Wikimedia infrastructure. From Wikidata to the Score extension, nearly all areas of the site saw improvement. Over 5,900 commits were made to the core MediaWiki codebase by over 200 different authors. MediaWiki extensions deployed on Wikimedia sites saw over 27,000 commits, by over 250 different authors.

Major features deployed in 2013 included Wikidata data inclusion in articles, Lua modules for faster and more advanced templates, Notifications for users including thanks, opt-out deployment of the VisualEditor (eventually reversed), and much more. At the same time, some older features like the "orange bar of doom" and certain less-used skins were removed.

On the backend, the Redis job queue was deployed, and a new caching center in San Francisco started serving traffic to users in Oceania with an RFP for another one still pending. Users now login using HTTPS by default, and plans were made for future HTTPS improvements.

Hiccups and bugs were experienced along the way, with the most severe being private user data being leaked through Wikimedia Labs. Overall, 10,845 bugs were filed in 2013, and 5,760 were marked as fixed.

In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.


 * Administrators will now see a warning if the page they are deleting is linked to by other pages (bug 35485).