User blog:Jpearson/MediaWiki 1.39 Technical Update: February 17, 2023

Hey everyone! We have an update about MediaWiki 1.39 we wanted to share ahead of next week’s Technical Update. We’ll update the editor community on bug fixes and product development updates bi-weekly and return to our regularly scheduled update on February 24, 2023!

Critical information:

 * This upgrade won’t change the design, our wikis will keep the same look as they had previously.


 * Most of the changes will happen under the hood, meaning they are not user-facing, but they will be important to ensure that everything is still working correctly.


 * The migrations are done in different batches, starting with 3-4 wikis without complex extensions, and adding more traffic, content, and extensions progressively in the subsequent batches.


 * One week before migration, a banner will appear on communities to let them know the migration is scheduled. For one week after the migration, a similar banner to let users know the community is now on the new version.


 * If your wiki is experiencing problems after the migration, please contact to your Wiki Representative or Fandom Staff. There is also a specific channel in our Discord server created for conversations about the upgrade, go to #mediawiki-upgrade and feel free to ask your questions or share your concerns!

Timeline:
Here is our timeline for what to expect throughout the migration process.


 * February 2023: Community Team testing.
 * February 27, 2023: First batch is migrated.
 * March 2023: All the new wikis created in the platform will use MW 1.39.
 * March 2023: We start the migration of the top 5000 most visited wikis.
 * Mid-March 2023: Wikis out of the top 5000 are starting to be migrated.
 * April 2023: Semantic MediaWiki and Cargo wikis are migrated.
 * May 2023: All the wikis are using 1.39.

Want to learn more? Check out the MediaWiki Update 1.39 help page.