MediaWiki 1.23

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MediaWiki 1.23 is an obsolete long-term support release of MediaWiki. Consult the RELEASE NOTES file for the full list of changes. It was deployed on Wikimedia Foundation wikis through incremental "wmf"-branches starting October 2013. The 1.23.0 stable release was released on June 5, 2014. Download the latest release or checkout the REL1_23 branch in Git to follow this release. This is a Long Term Support release (LTS) which was supported until end of May 2017.

There is a list of known issues in the current 1.23 that should be fixed in the next version of MediaWiki.

What's new

Notifications

With 1.23, MediaWiki starts to behave more like a modern website in regards to notifications to keep the editors of your wiki engaged and always up to date about what interests them. This used to require several custom settings.

bug 45020 Make preferences "Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist" and "pages and files I edit" true by default
bug 45022 Make preference "Email me when a page or file on my watchlist is changed" true by default
bug 49719 Watch user page and user talk page by default

This will allow your new users to immediately start benefiting from the watchlist and email notification features, without needing to first read all the docs to find out that they're as useful as they are.

Interface

bug 42026 Add option to only show page creations in Special:Contributions (and API).
Gerrit change 85446 Add new special page to list duplicate files, Special:ListDuplicatedFiles.
bug 60333 Add new special page listing tracking categories (Special:TrackingCategories).

Editing

A new special page Special:Diff was added, allowing users to create internal links to revision comparison pages using syntax such as Special:Diff/12345, Special:Diff/12345/prev or Special:Diff/12345/98765. See the help page on Diff for further information.

Help pages

With 1.23, MediaWiki begins a process of consolidation of its help pages. Now, most are using the Translate extension and can be easily translated and updated in hundreds of languages.

In the coming months, we'll focus on making more of the central help pages translatable and on linking them from the relevant MediaWiki interfaces for better discoverability. Please help: add your own translations; update existing pages and cover missing MediaWiki topics.

Traditionally, help pages have been scattered on countless wikis and poorly translated; most of those on mediawiki.org were migrated with the help of some Google Code-in students.

Localisation

9 new locales have been added:

Cheyenne
Cree
Kikuyu
Norman
Twi
Central Atlas Tamazight
Algerian Arabic
Hunsrik
Kinyarwanda

Their translation can be completed on translatewiki.net.

The localisation file format is now JSON: the above-mentioned additions are visible in the i18n directory.

Upgrade notices for MediaWiki administrators

Skin autodiscovery deprecated

Skin autodiscovery, the legacy skin installation mechanism used by MediaWiki since very early versions (around 2004), has been officially deprecated and will be removed in MediaWiki 1.25.

MediaWiki 1.23 will emit warnings in production if a skin using the deprecated mechanism is found.

See Manual:Skin autodiscovery for more information and a migration guide for site admins and skin developers.

Merged extensions

Merged into 1.23:

ExpandTemplates Gerrit #I7ef634 / bug 28264
AssertEdit Gerrit #Ia48151 / bug 27841 - documented at API:Assert

CSS refresh for Vector

Various Vector CSS properties have been converted to LESS variables.
The font size of #bodyContent/.mw-body-content has been increased to 0.875em.
The line-height of #bodyContent/.mw-body-content has been increased to 1.6.
The line-height of superscript (sup) and subscript (sub) are now set to 1.
The default color for content text (but not the headers) is now #252525; (dark grey).
All headers have updated sizes and margins.
H1 and H2 headers now use a serif font.
Body font is "sans-serif" as always.

For more information see Typography refresh.

Configuration

Add Config and GlobalVarConfig classes:

Allows configuration options to be fetched from context.
Only one implementation, GlobalVarConfig, is provided, which simply returns $GLOBALS[$name]. There can be more classes in the future, possibly a database-based one. For convenience the "wg" prefix is automatically added.
This adds the $wgConfigRegistry global variable which is used by the ConfigFactory to create new objects..
The RequestContext getConfig and setConfig methods were introduced.

Schema

New fields:

New indexes:

log_user_text_time on logging table
log_user_text_type_time on Logging table.

Release schedule

In February 2014, we introduced monthly point releases on the last Wednesday of the month. The dates for the point releases for 1.23 were as follows:

Release	Date
1.23.0	2014-06-05
1.23.1	2014-06-25
1.23.2	2014-07-30
1.23.3	2014-08-27
1.23.4	2014-09-24
1.23.5	2014-10-01
1.23.6	2014-10-29
1.23.7	2014-11-26
1.23.8	2014-12-17
1.23.9	2015-03-31
1.23.10	2015-08-10
1.23.11	2015-10-16
1.23.12	2015-12-18
1.23.13	2015-12-22^[1]
1.23.14	2016-05-20^[2]
1.23.15	2016-08-23^[3]
1.23.16	2017-04-06^[4]
1.23.17	2017-04-11^[5]

In January 2015 the system of providing monthly point releases was abandoned.

Subpages

[1] ttps://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-announce/2015-December/000187.html

[2] ttps://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-announce/2016-May/000188.html

[3] ttps://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-announce/2016-August/000195.html

[4] ttps://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-announce/2017-April/000207.html

[5] ttps://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-announce/2017-April/000208.html

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