Beta Features/PHP7

The Wikimedia Foundation has been employing to run MediaWiki in production since 2014. 

Since then, a few things happened that made it compelling for us to move back to the "official" interpreter:


 * PHP 7.x has brought huge performance improvements, so that its performance is nowadays comparable to, if not better than, HHVM for our needs. 


 * HHVM has dropped support for pure PHP in favour of Hack, an "evolution" of PHP which doesn't have widespread support. 

The Wikimedia Foundation is moving all Wikimedia wikis to use PHP7 in early 2019. 

PHP7 is available since January 2019.

You can verify that it is enabled for you by visiting 1>Special:Version|Special:Version on your wiki, and checking that it says "php" instead of "HHVM" in the "Installed software" table.

I am a non-technical user. What does this mean?
Hopefully nothing. This is about changing the software used to run the wiki's code. Ideally, you should notice no real difference.

When will this happen?
Work began in 2017 and ramped up over 2018. The beta feature is available since January 2019, and PHP 7 support should be production-complete in the first half of 2019.

What should I do if I find an issue?
Report it on Phabricator, in the [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/1/?projects=php_7.2_support PHP 7.2 support project.]

Why are edits being tagged?
This will help us identify performance, functional and stability concerns specific to PHP in comparison to HHVM.

You can ignore the PHP7 tags.

What should I do if the tag is being abused
If users are wrongfully attempting to include data using this tag, bring it to the attention of an Admin.

What if Admins are abusing the system/gaming the system?
That is an ongoing problem with Wikipedia.

Will PHP-tagged edits in the LTA (long-term abuse) datasets ever effect DNS-records in the way that emails wrongfully tagged as spam may be blacklisted?
DNS records are not recognized by abusive Wikipedia admins or by Admins who do not have sufficient IT-related knowledge to comprehend that the DNS records are verified and certified. Wrongfully tagging IP`s and email addresses as "Spam" could have detrimental effects.160.86.225.226 09:16, 4 March 2019 (UTC)