User blog:DaNASCAT/Wikia Completes MediaWiki Upgrade

We are proud to announce that Wikia has completed its upgrade of MediaWiki from version 1.16.5 to 1.19.2, one of the primary summer initiatives of our engineering team. As of this morning, every wiki should indicate it is on 1.19.2. on its Special:Version page.

Thanks to our community for your patience during this upgrade. As we’ve detailed in other blog posts in the last three months, this particular MediaWiki upgrade required more engineering time and attention due to the ResourceLoader component introduced in MediaWiki 1.17. Thus, we very deliberately rolled out the code via a script instead of trying to force a manual process, gathering data and fixing bugs as the 1.19 platform went live to more and more wikis.

Wikia’s engineering team also tried some new and unique methods of implementing MediaWiki upgrades during this period, branching our code out into two different “slots”. Each slot ran on a different version of MediaWiki, thus allowing us to easily migrate wikis to the 1.19 slot (slot-2) from the 1.16 slot (slot-1) without affecting service in any capacity. Slot-1 is now on 1.19 as well, so hopefully this will clear up some questions we’ve heard from our tech-saavy users.

Thanks again to our user community for their patience and understanding during this upgrade. Your time and commitment to letting Wikia staff know about any upgrade bugs or unexpected differences proved invaluable. If you are seeing 1.16.5 still being reported on your Special:Version page, please let us know via Special:Contact ASAP.