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).

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

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

2013
For 2013 and 2012 - the historical Extension:MobileFrontend/Deployments may 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

April
4th

enabled uploads and login CTA from upload button in articles

11th

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