User:Stephane Lo Presti/News/2022-09-26

State of the Wiki – September 27, 2022

Hi editors!

It's been a while since I communicated here, so I wanted to take a moment to talk about the state of the wiki following the maintenance on Monday, September 12. We plan wiki maintenance months in advance and test them, but our tests did not show some of the issues that have happened this time. While the wiki was functional, the content of articles was (and still is) inaccurate due to the state of the Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) data. SMW is an extension of MediaWiki that is heavily used on this wiki, requiring particular processes to be updated. After this maintenance, those processes took a long time to stabilize, making the data inaccurate. A lot of the issues are gone now, but we’re continuing to discuss the situation of the remaining problems with editors and wiki administrators (on the Wiki Discord, where it's easier to do quick back-and-forth and dive deeper into those issues).

Over the years, the content of the wiki has grown tremendously. We passed the 100,000 articles milestone earlier this year (congratulations, everybody, we made it!). The technical infrastructure behind the wiki has also been updated to help us better support this environment that grew in size and complexity. A principle that guided us over all these years was to leave the content to editors while we handled all the backend (where a lot of things are happening!). But SMW is an area of the content that made the backend gradually more complicated for us because the evolution of that content had practical implications for the backend work, for example, making some SMW scripts run a lot longer.

While we discussed different approaches to wiki maintenance a few update cycles ago, we haven’t felt the need to change a system that worked until the issues we observed this time. To better understand these issues, we need to take several steps back and explore parts of the wiki, like SMW, to understand how the content works to improve the backend procedures. We will contact various editors and administrators that modify SMW content to ensure we work with the wiki community!

We will then redefine our maintenance processes to be more predictable and manageable for us and smoother for all of you. This may mean that we do things differently, such as put the wiki offline for extended periods or in a read-only state. While we’re aiming for the next maintenance to be MediaWiki 1.40 sometime next year (and the public SMW roadmap is not updated yet), it may take a bit longer to figure things out. If you have questions or comments, feel free to leave them on my talk page, any relevant wiki page, or the Wiki Discord.

Thanks a lot for your patience and for being an amazing community of wiki editors.

--Stephane Lo Presti talk 21:18, 26 September 2022 (UTC)