MediaWiki 1.22

MediaWiki 1.22 was developed between March and October 2013. It was deployed on Wikimedia Foundation wikis through incremental -branches, starting in April 2013. The final, stable version will be released on December 06, 2013. Consult the for the full list of changes. Download the or checkout the   branch in Git for testing.

What's new?
MediaWiki 1.22 will include all changes released in the smaller  software deployments to Wikimedia sites.

Anti-spam and countervandalism improvements
Like MediaWiki 1.21, we're improving countervandalism and anti-spam features:
 * The patrolling system has been improved to make the "mark as patrolled" link available on any patrollable page or revision, without having to go to Special:RecentChanges or Special:NewPages. It is no longer necessary to look up the "rcid" URI parameter from these special pages.
 * SimpleAntiSpam, a small but harmless shield against the simplest forms of spambots, has been merged into core.

Editing improvements

 * When comparing revisions in the history or when previewing changes while editing, "(No difference)" is now shown in place of a diff when the revisions are identical.
 * After a successful edit, the confirmation message "Your edit was saved." is now shown. Formerly a separate extension (PostEdit), this feature is now part of the core software.

Upgrades to Vector and other skins
The old Vector extension has been merged into core, and the extension has been discontinued. The new version includes several improvements to both the Vector skin and cross-skin features. If you were previously using the Vector extension, you must uninstall it (the extension, not the skin) before upgrading to 1.22.


 * All skins:
 * Section edit links are now displayed next to their respective headings rather than along the opposite side of the page.
 * Lists of templates and categories used on the page, displayed below the edit form, are now collapsible. The area with license information, edit summary, and related functionality below the edit field has received a minor graphical lift.
 * An "edit warning" is now displayed when the user attempts to leave the edit page with unsaved changes, on browsers supporting dialogs.
 * Vector skin only:
 * Navigation menu subsections are now collapsible.
 * Page tabs can now dynamically fold into a dropdown menu when the browser window isn't wide enough to fit them.

Support for Composer
The Composer PHP dependency manager can now be used to install some extensions. It solves many common problems, including finding where to download an extension, resolving all of its dependencies and libraries, and selecting the right versions. Most MediaWiki extensions do not currently support Composer, but this is expected to change.

Upgrade notices for MediaWiki administrators
As with every release, there are some routine maintenance and upgrade tasks that go beyond the primary installation process.

PHP JSON extension now required
Though the minimum PHP version is still 5.3.2, MediaWiki now requires either the native JSON extension or the pecl-json-c fork. Most servers already have this PHP extension installed and enabled. However, if you administer your own server, and the MediaWiki installer says you don't have this extension:
 * If you compiled PHP yourself with the  configure option, you may have to recompile with.
 * On Red Hat or CentOS, check for the line  in    or.
 * Ubuntu 13.10, Fedora 19, and other recent Linux distributions package pecl-json-c separately, under names such as  (Ubuntu universe) and   (Fedora). They no longer include the original JSON extension because of licensing concerns.

Several ancient skins removed


On April 1, 2013, several ancient skins were removed from core (not an April Fools' joke): Chick, Classic, MySkin, Nostalgia and Simple. More information: Turning off outdated skins.

Nostalgia was the phase I/UseModWiki-like skin, and Classic was the main skin before the introduction of the default MonoBook in MediaWiki 1.3 on May 22, 2004. Dating back to February 2002, both skins existed over a year before MediaWiki got its name.

Blank system messages must be deleted
Blanking a system message (editing it on wiki to remove all content) will no longer restore the default value for the message, but instead make it show as an empty string in the interface (fixing, "Add ability to disable MediaWiki messages"). If you have blank messages on your wiki (check Special:AllMessages), you must delete them unless you want them to display as empty.

Protection rights usage has changed
A new setting was added for enabling cascading protection for protection levels other than "Allow only administrators". Shortly afterward, the way the "editprotected" and "autoconfirmed" rights work was changed. In particular, the "autoconfirmed" right is now only used for rate limiting, not page protection. If your wiki has custom user groups with the "autoconfirmed" right, you may need to grant those groups the new "editsemiprotected" right when you upgrade.

Special:Disambiguations has been removed
Special:Disambiguations, a page that listed "Pages linking to disambiguation pages", has been removed. If your wiki used this feature, consider using Extension:Disambiguator, which provides similar functionality and will be bundled in the tarball. Switching to the new extension is easy and generally only requires a small change to a single template.