Work proceeds on bugs in MediaWiki upgrade as watchlists break
Wikipedia's upgrade to version 1.5 of the MediaWiki software continued this week as developers finished converting the remaining projects and moved on to fixing newly discovered problems. The bug that undoubtedly affected the most people was a temporary glitch in the operation of user watchlists.
Editing on Wikipedia after the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.5 began last Tuesday after a day of read-only service to accomplish the transition (see archived story). Once the English Wikipedia was finished, the developers moved on to upgrade the remaining Wikipedia languages, along with Wikibooks, the one project that had not been converted to version 1.5 before work began on Wikipedia. For the most part, this was accomplished with less inconvenience than the day that the English Wikipedia had to be put in read-only mode. Chief Technical Officer Brion Vibber noted that the second-largest project, the German Wikipedia, was not too large to be upgraded overnight, and was fortunate "to have an 'overnight' in the first place."
Since Wikipedia and other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are used for beta testing the software, to a certain extent bugginess is to be expected at the beginning of an upgrade cycle. A number of problems were listed on a page for MediaWiki 1.5 bugs, although the MediaZilla bug tracker is the place where bugs are actually reported and monitored.