Reading/Web/Release timeline

This page attempts to track notable changes that impact the reading web experience in production. For older years, these appear empty purely because we never documented our work back then. Feel free to jump in and do so, every data point helps! These will usually have an associated SWAT deploy due to the fact that the reading web team makes heavy use of feature flags.

🎂 is used to mark releases the team feels are worth celebrating and usually mark the end of a long line of work.

Dates should reflect a date the change went into production for all wikis (unless a specific wiki is stated).

See also: Reading/Web/Notable_incidents

January
21st Max-width is reduced to 500px. (T264218)

October
8th

A technical change enabled by desktop improvements simplifies the Modern skin so that it much easier to maintain (T259401)

September
30th

Deployed the new location of the search bar to new vector and begin A/B test on test wikis

16th

An error surfaced by the client side error logging blocks the train (T263047) - a significant milestone as this has never happened before.

August
28th

Lead paragraph transform now applies to images as well as infoboxes.

19th

SEO impact: Enable $wgMFNoindexPages for all wikis

18th

Technical debt payoff: PHP InlineDifferenceEngine removed

5th

Desktop improvements default for French Wikipedia

July
28th

Sidebar instrumentation enabled on Vector

Desktop improvements default for Persian Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia

22nd

Desktop improvements default for Basque Wikipedia, French Wiktionary, and Portuguese Wikiversity

21st

New version of Vector skin deployed as a user preference to all projects (T254228)

13th

First NPM development release of WVUI.

June
29th

Skins: Deprecation of various hooks and introducing SkinMustache

4th

Collapsible sidebar now on office wiki

May
11th

New Vector on office wiki (new header, Latest-mode opt-out)

April
9th

MediaWiki:MobileMainPage has been removed from Hindi and Russian wiki. T243996

1st

Kick off Vue.js discussions in earnest

March
16th

Vector is type checked without exception

February
12th

Ordered list styles are translated on Minerva https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T217616

January
9th

the mobile main menu now works without JS (more responsive) T225213

Lead paragraph transform available in other namespaces (T211063)

Mobile site now uses diff engine and PHP in core. (T117279)

December
19th

Article and talk tabs, history button, and improved user pages now available to all logged-in users on mobile

5th

Talk pages no longer render as a modal via JS (Date may not be accurate, delayed because of thanksgiving)

3rd

The first of many Web changes to Vector are deployed.

October
24th

Main watchstar for Minerva uses core code (T234970).

17th

The mobile treatment of Echo now lives in the Echo extension T221007 and is live on English Wikipedia.

10th

The main menu is now being server side rendered as well as client side rendered (T234650)

September
17th

Icon refactor deployed after a couple of weeks working on several bugs & regressions. T229440

August
28th

AMC outreach drawer deployed T231206.

20th

Cologne Blue hidden in Special:Preferences to users who are not using it T223824

7th

🎂AMC deployed to all Wikipedias (228916)

July
30th

AMC user menu deployed.

June
5th

Deployed AMC history special page to Arabic, Indonesian, and Spanish Wikipedias (T224970)

19th

Deployed AMC to Persian, Italian, Thai, and Japanese Wikipedias (T225123)

May
1st

Removed Hogan from MobileFrontend. Mobile site now uses Mustache (standard template library of core). 

2nd

Deployed AMC main menu to Arabic, Indonesian, and Spanish Wikipedias (T216152)

31st

Deployed AMC overflow menu to Arabic, Indonesian, and Spanish Wikipedias (T223883)

April
30th

SEO A/B test concludes. Rollout to 100% of main namespace pages on all wikis. T209377

9th

History form is collapsible [wmf/1.34.0-wmf.1]

March
28th

History page is now an OOUI form [1.33.0-wmf.24]

20th

AMC now deployed to eswiki, arwiki, idwiki: T217643

7th

AMC is now live on the beta cluster!

14th

QuickSurveys now supports targeting based on edit count, country and whether user is logged in or anon

15th

iOS scroll hacks disabled on mobile

18th

Thanks actions (and other log accounts) can now be tagged. Will now be tagged with mobile/AMC.

February
8th

MobileFrontend now supports ECMAScript 6 for code development (doesn't run in production).

25th


 * First Humans of the Web (Readers Web, Editing, and Growth teams) gathering

26th


 * Talk and language overlays now open without a delay (T215370, T215657)
 * WebClientErrors updated to distinguish logged in bugs VS anonymous bugs.
 * CentralNotice banners are now inlined under the Minerva header

January
🎂22nd

Page issues deployed to English Wikipedia

27th

✋ All Hands from 27th January until 2nd February — event outline, conference schedule. No releases.

31st

All JavaScript in MobileFrontend is now bundled with Webpack.

December
18th

Page issues deployed to all wikipedias except enwiki. T210553

November
19th

Staged rollout of SEO A/B A/B test concluded at 100%. T208755

14th

Staged rollout of SEO A/B A/B test started at 1%. T208755

October
1st

Page issues A/B test enabled for 5% and then 20 minutes later 20% of users on Japanese, Farsi, Russian and English Wikipedia. T200792

3rd

setup beta cluster dashboard for monitoring events in beta cluster. This allows us to identify problems early before they hit production. T202026

17th

client side error reporting for mobile added to production T206702

🎂18th


 * After a big investment, we now have a new graph shows JavaScript errors in the mobile site across all Wikipedia's. At time of writing number of errors peaked at 3.9k a minute. Every minute 3,900 users experience an error and we have no idea why. We need Sentry!
 * [Proton] RESTBase mirroring 100% of all production traffic to Proton (T186748#4677976)

September
27th

English Wikivoyage now has page previews. T203981

26th

ReadingDepth was adjusted (1.32.0-wmf.23) to allow A/B tests to explicitly enable the schema where it was not previously possible. (T204144)

25th

The sampling rate for ReadingDepth was bumped from 0.1 to 10% (T205176)

19th

Page issues A/B test is enabled on Latvian Wikipedia (T204609)

18th

[Proton] RESTBase mirroring 25% of all production traffic to Proton (T186748#4595101)

6th


 * MobileFrontend using Webpack to build some of its JavaScript. Plans to broaden this to other files (T199452)
 * Client side error logging via EventLogging is now available on all wikis (but disabled) T202026

August
21st

There is now a standardised way of obtaining a page token across our EventLogging schemas. This should help us link activity across schemas T201124

24th

Mobile diffs now show moved paragraphs

30th

Bug fix: Restored action=init events to Schema:Edit from mobile [phab:T202786]]

July
12th (TBC) Page previews now do not display wide margin between text and image - T192928

May
10th Desktop: mw-collapsible now doesn't cause flash of unstyled content. Messages can now be passed as LESS variables T42812

April
3rd VirtualPageviews enabled for all wikis for page preview viewing logging. T189906

4th DNT header now ignored in page preview view tracking T4052896

11th Page previews to 100% of users on German Wikipedia [[phab:T191966]

12th Page previews to 10% of users on English Wikipedia

17th Page previews rolled out to enwiki. We deployed to 25%, 37.5% then 100% of users over the course of a morning. (T191101)🎂

March
1st

Deployed html previews to all wikipedias. 6th
 * Bug fix: broken thumbnail issue in page previews
 * Bug fix: Page previews text and formulas cut off on arwiki

Bug fix: Removing parentheses breaks chemical formulas

20th: Disambiguation popups

26th: Hindi mobile campaign goes live

February
5th

Enabled a new mobile logo for Pashto Wikipedia.

6th

Bug fix: Download PDF button now limited to versions of Android that support PDFs (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T182059)

New settings page code merged to master

13th-15th

New settings page; fontchanger and expand all sections released to production (covers https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T67079 too).

20th disabled settings link on Special:MobileOptions due to persistent vandalism by anonymous users. Several years ago we had a contact form with similar problems. Lesson relearned: asking for anonymous feedback on mobile usually leads to vandalism.

22nd

Enabled HTML previews on cswiki.

January
8th

Language icon disabled on Wikidata and MediaWiki.

11th

MobileFormatter refactored. Infoboxes wrapped in mw-stack element will now be swapped with lead paragraph on mobile

17th

SWATed some fixes to new lead paragraph logic (changed last week to consider div.mw-stack elements)

December
11th
 * Turned on EventLogging for Page Previews

November
15th
 * Deploy print to PDF button for Chrome on Android
 * Turned off EventLogging for Page previews

October
9th

Enabled print styles on Vector on test wiki

10th

Disabled OCG

11th

Enabled new Vector print styles on all wikis

18th

Restarted Page Previews A/B test on enwiki and dewiki

September
7th

Disable Wikidata descriptions on all wikipedias.

18th

Stopped page previews A/B test on enwiki and dewiki.

25th

Disabled RelatedArticles instrumentation

August
16th

Page previews launched on all wikis except en and de

28th

Launched Popups A/B test on enwiki and dewiki

July
11th

Firefox event logging duplicate event bug fixed

17th

Minerva separated from MobileFrontend in production

19th

Stopped RelatedArticles A/B test

June
2nd

Electron rolled out to all projects

7th

A/B test launched on RelatedArticles

14th

Cards removed from cluster

May
2nd

🎂 Related pages enabled for everyone

Print styles enabled for Minerva

3rd

Wikivoyage switches to new version of RelatedArticles

24th

🎂 First paragraph moved before infobox on all projects

April
3rd

Wikidata descriptions disabled in English Wikipedia

4th

ES3 JavaScript support dropped

5th

Page previews enabled on Hungarian and Hebrew Wikipedia

13th

Related pages enabled on Haitan wikipedia (desktop)

20th

Non-JavaScript users can edit mobile site

March
20th

Page images restricted to lead section

29th

🎂 New header rolled out to mobile web

February
2nd

RelatedArticles shown to 90% of users

14th

Merged Popups frontend rewrite into master

21st

Reading depth schema deployed

23rd

New mobile header rolled out to cawiki and itwiki

January
19th

🎂 Wikidata descriptions shown on English Wikipedia

December
5th

Wikidata descriptions enabled on French and German Wikipedia

RelatedArticles enabled on Japanese and Spanish Wikipedia

November
8th

Began rewrite of Page previews codebase

October
3rd

Wikidata descriptions on Japanese and Spanish wikis

RelatedArticles enabled on mobile for all but 6 wikis

🎂 New footer pushed to mobile

11th

Disable bottom language button in Minerva

August
4th

🎂 New language switcher launched to all wikis

17th

🎂 Lazy loaded images enabled on mobile

30th

Enable wikidata descriptions on all but 6 wikis

Lazy loaded references experiments ended

July
5th

Lazy loaded images on Japanese wikipedia

12th

Lazy loaded images and references on Thai Wiki

18th

Lazy loaded images and references on Russian Wiki

June
6th

Enable page previews A/B test for 50% of users on Hungarian Wikipedia

14th

Lazy loaded images on Ukrainian and Farsi Wikipedia's

30th

Lazy loaded images on Tagalog Wikipedia

May
9th

Lazy loaded images on Bengali Wikipedia

April
26th

Lazy loaded references enabled in beta.

February
17th

New language overlay shown to 10% of users

21st

Gather disabled by RFC T127509

April
2

Gather deployed T91341

October
Anonymous editing A/B test on Italian Wikipedia for mobile (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_mobile_editing_in_Italian_Wikipedia) leads to anonymous editing everywhere.

August
28th

Mobile uploads disabled on mobile web after vote.

June
17th

Tablets redirected to mobile site (data)

2013
For 2013 - the historical Extension:MobileFrontend/Deployments may also be useful.

August
27th


 * enabled showing edit button in article sections (not just at the top of the page) + CTA for logged out users
 * released Echo notifications to projects where Echo was enabled (en, hu, pl, pt, sv, ru)

July
23

Mobile editor launched, showed login CTA from upload & edit buttons to logged out users

30

disabled login CTA from upload button

March
28th

Mobile uploads went live

April
4th

enabled uploads and login CTA from upload button in articles

11th

disabled login CTA from upload button in articles (ending the selfiepocalypse)

2012
For 2012 - the historical Extension:MobileFrontend/Deployments may be useful.

October
Mobile beta introduced

June
First version of mobile (Ruby gateway)