Like writing the encyclopedia itself, MediaWiki development is collaborative; so, for a long time, was the fine-tuning of Wikimedia's technical setup, with volunteers routinely being added to the list of system administrators. As the Wikimedia family grew, however, so the ability to break whole Wikimedia sites through the omission of a single semicolon began to depress both volunteer interest in the role and institutional willingness to give out the requisite permissions. It is reversing this trend by "opening up" infrastructure development to the wider community that forms the primary aim of the relatively new Wikimedia Labs project, wrote Operations Engineer Ryan Lane in a recent blogpost.
Therefore, at a fundamental level Wikimedia Labs approximates a large collection of (virtual) sandboxes, with complex virtualisation techniques allowing swathes of users to try out new server setups without affecting the underlying configuration. Of course, the value that administrators like Lane see in Labs is its potential to put server administration on a par with software development in terms of ease of collaboration – not a bad thing, considering the detailed and often highly specialised nature of the different parts of system administration that come together to form a top-ten website.
The potential doesn't stop there, however: once the virtual environments have been established, they can then be put to use by their respective projects (of which there are now some 79). Each project reflects a real world initiative; Lane uses the example of "testing and developing MediaWiki extensions for Incubator", but others abound. Other high profile projects include support for several major bots, the central development centre for a "web based version of Huggle" and emulators useful for testing MediaWiki versions before release. Unlike with a normal (non-virtual) server setup, new projects are quick (and hence cheap) to establish and dissolve. Nevertheless, with the project still in its early stages, it is as yet unclear what the full implication of the creation of a WMF-hosted "Labs" environment on development practices will be.
In deployments across April 16 and 18, MediaWiki 1.20wmf1 went live on Wikimedia Commons and all other non-Wikipedia wikis (i.e. Wiktionaries, Wikisources, Wikinewses, Wikibookses, Wikiquotes, Wikiversities, and other miscellaneous wikis). Although several issues were reported, none has yet proved major enough to cause the deployments to halt (one individual change – to IRC formatting – was reverted on the grounds that its cost was like to be greater than its benefit). As of time of writing, the deployment to the English Wikipedia has just been completed; other Wikipedias will follow on April 25. As noted earlier this month (see previous Signpost coverage) the deployment's importance does not lie with radical changes to the look and feel of the site; indeed, with the notable exception of diff colours (which have already begun to divide opinion) and a handful of other minor tweaks, the success of the deployment is likely to be measured in terms of how inconspicuous the whole process ends up being.
Elsewhere, with the resolution of bug #34885 (correcting bad fallback behaviour in Internet Explorer 7 and the compatibility modes of later versions), Wikimedia developers are now ready to begin the process for releasing MediaWiki 1.19 to external wikis this week (wikitech-l mailing list). The update went live to Wikimedia wikis in February, but has since had to take a back seat during the turmoil of the Git switchover and, more recently, the 1.20wmf1 release. A final version of MediaWiki 1.20 (including not just the contents of 1.20wmf1 but also of subsequent WMF deployments) is unlikely to be released to external wikis before August or September.
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Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
<math>...</math>) without resorting to PNG conversion, has now been enabled as a <math>-rendering preference on MediaWiki.org for testing purposes (wikitech-l mailing list). The move follows years of on-off discussion and development of alternative options to the current PNG-based system (including a MathJax-based user script). Among other features MathJax boasts a lightbox-style facility, selectable equations and perfect typographical clarity at all zoom levels. Users are encouraged to try it out on MediaWiki.org, ahead of a wider rollout.
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Diff colors
Can we please have brighter diff colors? I can barely see these. For a small change like punctuation, it is very difficult to find the change. I know that most Wikipedians have young eyes, but have some compassion for us old folks! -- Ssilvers (talk) 01:55, 25 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]