MediaWiki 1.19/Communications

Communications plan
Guillaume is leading a plan to communicate to the wikis in early February this deployment timeline. (Need to integrate ideas from Development process improvement/Communications recommendations.)
 * 1) reach out to the localisation-team@lists.wikimedia.org folks
 * 2) reach out to the language support teams that Gerard M. facilitates
 * 3) reach out to the IRC channel of wiki admins, and maybe to the translators that Siko B. can reach out to
 * 4) reach out to all WMF staff
 * 5) reach out to wikitech-l email list (done 26 Jan 2012)
 * 6) reach out to the wikitech-ambassadors email list (26 Jan 2012)
 * 7) reach out to Maggie Dennis who is gathering a coterie of liaisons to different wiki communities (done by Sumana 6 Feb 2012)

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?

Less important: Are there special days/dateranges in February where your community would be REALLY really unhappy if you had a window with no access or no editability? Maybe there's an important election happening in one of the countries you serve that day? (Less important because there is practically no chance any wiki will be taken down or turned uneditable with this release, the developers assure us.)

As usual with deployments, we will also do a CentralNotice notice the day of the deployments to each wiki.

Pre-deployment heads-up message

 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical.ambassadors/31
 * MediaWiki 1.19
 * MediaWiki 1.19/Roadmap
 * m:User:Krinkle/Le Tour de Wikí/2011 Resource Walker
 * ResourceLoader/Migration guide (users)
 * 34147
 * ResourceLoader/JavaScript Deprecations
 * ResourceLoader/Default modules — Need to be declared explicitly if used
 * http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page
 * http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Problem_reports
 * Upcoming ResourceLoader IRC workshop

Deployment notice

 * m:Generic maintenance notice

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