MediaWiki 1.29/en

MediaWiki 1.29 is the latest release of MediaWiki. Consult the file for the full list of changes. It was deployed on Wikimedia Foundation wikis through incremental "wmf"-branches starting November 1, 2016. The 1.29.0 stable release is expected to come out in July 2017. Download the or checkout the   branch in Git to follow this release.

Configuration changes

 * Default cookie expiration time has been reduced to 30 days. Login cookie expiration time is kept at 180 days.
 * is now true by default to work around restrictive DMARC policies.
 * Subpages are now enabled by default in the Template namespace.

New features

 * Added, to allow for automatically blocking anonymous edits from certain IP ranges (e.g. private IPs).
 * Added new magic word  which returns the language code of the page being parsed.
 * Users can now be assigned to user groups for a limited period of time. See the help page for more information.

Action API changes

 * Submitting sensitive authentication request parameters to,  ,  , and   in the query string is now an error. They should be submitted in the POST body instead.
 * The capture option for  has been removed
 * now requires a POST.
 * API errors and warnings may be requested in non-English languages using the new,  , and   parameters.
 * API error codes may have changed. Most notably, errors from modules using parameter prefixes (e.g. all query submodules) will no longer be prefixed.
 * may return a "Warnings" status, and now returns 'warnings' and 'errors' subelements (as applicable) instead of 'message'.
 * returns an 'errors' subelement rather than.
 * now reports errors when moving the talk page as an array under key, rather than using   and  . The format for subpage move errors has also changed.
 * no longer includes a "rendered" property on warnings and errors for each item. Use  if you're wanting parsed output.
 * no longer returns a  property. Use   if you're wanting HTML formatting of error messages.
 * now reports optional stash failures as an array under key 'stasherrors' rather than a 'stashfailed' text string.
 * reports 'errors' and 'warnings' instead of a single 'error', and no longer returns a 'message' on success.
 * Added  to validate passwords for the account creation and password change forms.

Action API internal changes

 * New methods were added to ApiBase to handle errors and warnings using i18n keys. Methods for using hard-coded English messages were deprecated:
 * ApiBase::dieUsage was deprecated
 * ApiBase::dieUsageMsg was deprecated
 * ApiBase::dieUsageMsgOrDebug was deprecated
 * ApiBase::getErrorFromStatus was deprecated
 * ApiBase::parseMsg was deprecated
 * ApiBase::setWarning was deprecated
 * ApiBase::$messageMap is no longer public. Code attempting to access it will result in a PHP fatal error.
 * The $message parameter to the hook should be set to an ApiMessage. This is compatible with MediaWiki 1.27 and later. Returning a code for ApiBase::parseMsg will no longer work.
 * is deprecated in favor of . For the time being   is a subclass of   to allow things that catch only   to still function properly.
 * If, for some strange reason, code was using an  instead of , note that the result format has changed and various methods now take a module path rather than a module name.
 * ApiMessageTrait::getApiCode now strips 'apierror-' and 'apiwarn-' prefixes from the message key, and maps some message keys for backwards compatibility.

Languages updated
MediaWiki supports over 350 languages. Many localisations are updated regularly. Below only new and removed languages are listed, as well as changes to languages because of Phabricator reports.


 * Based as always on linguistic studies on intelligibility and language knowledge by geography, language fallbacks have been expanded. When a translation is missing in the user's preferred interface language, the corresponding translation for the fallback language will be used instead. English will only be used as last resort when there are no translations. Some configurations (such as date formats and gender namespaces) have also been updated when using the fallback language's configuration was inadequate. The new or reinstated language fallbacks are (after cs ↔ sk in 1.28): hsb ↔ dsb, io → eo, mdf → ru, pnt → el, roa-tara → it.

No fallback for Ukrainian

 * The fallback from Ukrainian to Russian was removed. The Ukrainian language will now use the default fallback language: English. When a translation to Ukrainian is not available, an English string will be shown.

Other changes

 * wiki.phtml entry point was removed. Refer to  instead. If you want "wiki.phtml" URLs to continue to work, set up redirects. In Apache, this can be done by enabling mod_rewrite and adding the following rules to your configuration: