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. It won't have the nice formatting of the CentralNotice banner, but the content will be there.

It's a good practice to enable the Sitenotice 10 minutes before the actual maintenance, and hang out in #wikimedia-tech (we advertise that channel on the banner's landing page).

When the maintenance is over, go through the Sitenotice links again and replace their content with a single hyphen:.

Phase 2 (✅)
Use the Generic maintenance notice with the following parameters:
 * Start date & time: 10 min before the maintenance begins
 * End date & time: a few hours later. You'll disable the banner once the maintenance is over, so you just need to make sure that it doesn't disappear before you're done.
 * Project: Commons only
 * Languages: all
 * Geotargeted: leave unchecked
 * Enabled: check this when you want to actually enable the banner
 * Preferred: check this; it will give the banner precedence over any other non-preferred banner running at the same time (Technical maintenance takes precedence)
 * Locked: leave unchecked
 * Remove: Don't touch this!

Don't forget to click the Submit button at the very bottom of the page to save your changes.

This interface controls the campaign; the banner itself is managed through another special page, but you shouldn't have any good reason to edit it (so please don't).

Don't forget to disable the banner when the maintenance is over. This is done by unchecking "Enabled" and submitting the changes. Otherwise, it'll run until the End date & time you specified.

''Note: If you're wondering why we're using CentralNotice for Commons, instead of the local Sitenotice, it's because CentralNotice allows us to show the maintenance notice in all languages. Commons is a multilingual project and many users don't understand English (much). To show the notice in all languages with Sitenotice, we'd have to create a subpage of for each language. CentralNotice handles this automatically, and since it allows us to select only "Commons" as the target project, there won't be false positives (i.e. the notice won't show on other projects).''

Phase 3
Use the Generic maintenance notice with the same parameters as above, except for:
 * Projects: select all but Commons and Wikipedia

Phase 5
Use the Generic maintenance notice with the same parameters as above, except for:
 * Projects: Wikipedia only
 * Languages: 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