User:GhostInTheMachine/Short descriptions 2020-10-13

For Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions/2020-10-13 ??


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 TeacupY.
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

See also

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