Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/Essential work/2026-03-20

Essential Work

Weekly essential work update for 2026-W12

Shipped

• T415922 a very alpha version of patchdemo as a development environment as a service (feature flagged as of right now).

  Very alpha version of editing a live patchdemo

• T287582 (not this week, but recent) splitting Wikidata tests to run in a parallel track improved merge times for MediaWiki core by about 10 minutes per change (39% improvement) https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T287582#11666090
• Phabricator vandalism cleanup. We turned on account approval for a while. It's off again.
• Gerrit scraping took down Gerrit this week. Scrapers have been blocked.

Blockers

• N/A

Lessons Learned

• N/A

Community collab

• T419188 Catalyst CI for Ultraviolet userscript. Developers working on an antivandalism user script would like to use Catalyst—the API that powers patchdemo—to test their userscript. In progress.

Other

Deployment of MediaWiki 1.46.0-wmf.20

Gradual rollout win: testwiki caught T420315 which would have been bad to deploy further "All and any pages in the Category: namespace seem to throw an exception on testwiki"

• MediaWiki_1.46/wmf.20
  • 494 Patches ▁▅▂▃█
  • 0 Rollbacks ▄▄▄▄▄
  • 0 Days of delay ▄▄▄▄▄
  • 5 Blockers ▃▁▁██
• Train task: T413811
• 📊 Stats and trends: 🚂 Wikimedia Deployment Train Dashboard