MediaWiki 1.19/Communications

Wikimedia deployment
Aim: spread the word that the deployments are gonna probably be coming in February, and tell them 3 things:
 * 1) test now!!  on the test deployment site for your wiki!  I'm especially looking at you, Commons or sites with unusual gadgets or something!
 * 2) Do you have some unusual technical thing -- user scripts, gadgets, unique bots, etc. -- set up on your wiki such that we should stagger you in a different stage than we had thought?


 * Initial heads-up sent by Sumana to wikitech-l, wikitech-ambassadors

Pre-deployment heads-up distribution list

 * Wikimedia tech blog ✅
 * mail:wikimediaannounce-l, mail:wikitech-l, mail:wikitech-ambassadors, mail:foundation-l, and all project-specific lists ✅
 * m:Global message delivery ✅

Pre-deployment heads-up message

 * Moved to MediaWiki 1.19/Deployment announcement.

Deployment notice

 * Update Generic maintenance notice ✅
 * continue to update translations
 * Update m:Wikimedia maintenance notice and set it up for translation. ✅
 * Set up Sitenotices & CentralNotice for phases 1 to 5. ✅, see below.
 * Set up social media announces

Phase 1
Because of bugzilla:31036, there's no easy way to display a notice to a random selection of wikis, so we have to do it manually for each one of them using their Sitenotice.

Phase 2
Use the Generic maintenance notice on Commons only, in all languages.

Phase 3
Use the Generic maintenance notice for all projects except Commons and Wikipedia, in all languages.

Phase 3
Use the Generic maintenance notice for Wikipedia, in all languages except Esperanto (eo), Simple English (simple), Dutch (nl) and Polish (pl).

1.19 release
Channels: mediawiki-l, mediawiki-announce, Wikimedia blog, social media channels. See also Release checklist