MediaWiki is the wiki editing software that powers Fandom.
Hello hello!
It’s that time of the year! Not only to listen to the most famous Mariah Carey’s song everywhere but also the time to upgrade Fandom to MediaWiki 1.43.
In recent years, Fandom has strongly emphasized experimentation and exploration, driving innovation and improvement across the platform, both with minor and major changes. This commitment to pushing boundaries has given us valuable insights and advancements in various areas. It has helped us have new perspectives about our traffic, users, and platform, as well as identify which areas can be improved.
Aside from moving forward, we also want to keep the platform stable and updated. Our last MediaWiki upgrade was 2 years ago, and we think it is the perfect time to update again.
Upgrading MediaWiki from version 1.39 to the latest stable version, 1.43, aligns perfectly with this spirit of innovation. It allows Fandom to leverage the latest advancements in MediaWiki technology to further enhance performance, security, functionality, and user experience for its massive community of editors and readers.
As past updates have proven, software updates can always be tricky and potentially result in breaking code that is not compatible anymore with the latest version. However, this isn’t our first rodeo, so we have a solid plan to prevent that from happening as much as possible.
But first of all, what’s MediaWiki?
MediaWiki and its upgrades[]
Special:Version shows the current MediaWiki version and installed extensions.
MediaWiki is the software that powers wiki editing on Fandom and thousands of wikis around the Internet, including Wikipedia, the main wiki of the Wikimedia family. This is the core, the technical heart if you will, of the platform. All the components and extensions are integrated into MediaWiki, even our own tools like Discussions, Interactive Maps, Walls, etc. All of them operate in MediaWiki as gears of a major machine.
An upgrade of this software not only affects the wikis by changing a few parts of the user interface, it touches every aspect of the platform and therefore needs a deep revision of every extension installed here (around 300) together with other components, some of them with very complicated processes like Cargo or Semantic MediaWiki. This process not only drives the indirect review of all those extensions, also the database has to be updated, and hundreds of parallel processes that we run every day to keep the platform running without major problems.
With all that, as you can imagine, the bigger the jump, the bigger the effort to make it. This time, we are jumping from 1.39 to 1.43, four different versions of MediaWiki. Still, by doing that, we’ll be able to benefit from all the internal bug fixes, corrections, new tools, and other changes that the Wikimedia Foundation created.
Timeline[]
So what is this plan I alluded to before?
- October 2024:
- Preparation.
- December 2024:
- Default MediaWiki extensions review.
- Community Team testing (2 months).
- January 2025:
- Review of other used extensions.
- DPL extension review.
- Cargo and Semantic MediaWiki review.
- Migration of the first batch of wikis.
- February 2025:
- 10% of the traffic is migrated to the new version.
- March 2025:
- 50% of the traffic is migrated, including top 5k wikis.
- April 2025:
- Everything is done at the end of the month.
As you can see, the plan is very ambitious but also realistic. We have a long testing period, with many engineers and members of the Community Team involved in identifying and fixing bugs.
As before, we plan to create clones of certain wikis with complex templates and extensions to allow the admins to test them as well. We’ll also be creating a test wiki on the new MediaWiki 1.43 software, where everyone can and is encouraged to make their own tests and check how it works.
This plan is similar to previous upgrades, but we are reducing the code freeze duration this time. During a code freeze, the platform's code is frozen without major changes due to the complexity of testing it in 2 different versions of MediaWiki. In this upgrade, we plan to start the release of new experiments and tools as soon as possible, so you will have more updates.
Changes[]
During the next weeks, our team will work on identifying some of the major changes and publish a help page with more information about them. We will keep you updated about the upgrade in our Technical Updates.
Please keep an eye on future blog posts, and feel free to ask any questions!
All I want for this year is an upgrade…
More upgrades[]
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