MediaWiki 1.20/Communications

This communications cycle will be a lot less thorough than 1.19 communications were, due to lack of time but also because the April 2012 1.20 deployment is a much smaller change than 1.19 was and thus less communication is necessary.

Wikimedia deployment of 1.20wmf1
Aim: spread the word that the deployments are coming and that they should communicate with the developers, preferably via Bugzilla, if they encounter a new problem.

Pre-deployment heads-up distribution list

 * Wikimedia tech blog
 * mail:wikimediaannounce-l, mail:wikitech-l, mail:wikitech-ambassadors, mail:foundation-l
 * m:Global message delivery

Pre-deployment heads-up message

 * See MediaWiki 1.20/Deployment announcement.

Deployment notice

 * Update Generic maintenance notice and continue to update translations
 * Update m:Wikimedia maintenance notice and set it up for translation.
 * Set up Sitenotices & CentralNotice for phases 1 to 4.
 * Set up social media announces

Phase 0
MediaWiki.org and testwiki deployment: ✅ with communications by engineers.

Phase 1
All non-Wikipedia sites (Commons, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, and other sites).

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.
 * Projects: select all but Wikipedia
 * 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 MediaWiki:Sitenotice 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 2
Use the Generic maintenance notice with the same parameters as above, except for:
 * Projects: English Wikipedia only

Phase 3
Use the Generic maintenance notice with the same parameters as above, except for:
 * Projects: Wikipedia only
 * Languages: all languages except English (en)

When we release 1.20
Channels: mediawiki-l, mediawiki-announce, Wikimedia blog, social media channels. See also Release checklist