MediaWiki 1.34 - Editor Notes

The wiki recently upgraded to MediaWiki 1.34. Aside from the trouble we had upgrading to this version, the issues are the same as in the MediaWiki 1.30.

This page is part of Editing the Wiki.

Uploading Files

This remains an issue. It is slightly different than before: if there is a redlink in an image gallery and you click on it then you will be taken to the EDIT page for that image - this behaviour is different than before - but if you then press cancel you go to the FILE page where you can click the upload link. It took quite a bit to get these redlinks to appear again and the hope is that this is "fixed" in later versions of MediaWiki as our "fix" involved tweaking some MediaWiki code. See earlier notes: 1.30

Upgrade Issues

Moving to this version of the wiki was painful. We tried first from 1.31 to 1.35 but that did not work, then we backtracked to 1.34 which also failed when applying the upgrade script. The errors related to certain early user accounts, spammers we had blocked and deleted back in 2010, and 1 genuine user account that was deleted per request back then and then recreated under the same name. The error log suggested running a php script to fix the bad data but this required command line access which we don't have; our only option was to manually "fix" the data - there were only a few records, maybe 60 in total, but identifying them and safely fixing them was quite time-consuming.

Next update

The next "easy" update would be to MediaWiki 1.35 which is a Lifetime Support version (LTS).