User:GhostInTheMachine/Short descriptions 2020-10-13
For Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions/2020-10-13 ??
- xref Wikipedia_talk:Short_description#No_short_descriptions
- xref Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Wikidata_short_descriptions_no_longer_showing_up
On 13 October 2020, there was a tiny but highly significant change to the English Wikipedia.
The effects of the change was discovered by various editors the following day.
This is an attempt at a technical summary of the change.
- Health warning
- Not many people will want to work through all of the details. The Important Bits are highlighted with a
. - But
- There is little value in spending time looking into something unless you tell others what you found
- 2020-08-04
- Phabricator ticket T259622 is created
- System Administrator disables Wikidata fallback for article descriptions
- This ticket covers the work to be done to add a flag that
- 2020-09-21
- Phabricator ticket T263493 is created
- Reader gets appropriate article short description in search results
- 2020-09-29 (a Tuesday)
- Version wmf.11 of the MediaWiki software is deployed to the Wikimedia test sites (Group 0) as part of the standard weekly deployment cycle
- The changes causes issues — See T263177 for all of the details
- 2020-09-30 (Wednesday)
- The wmf.11 change is rolled back
- 2020-10-01 (Thursday)
- The software causing the error is altered and re-deployed to a limited set of wikis
- 2020-10-13
- Version MediaWiki 1.36/wmf.11