MediaWiki Stakeholders' November News Roundup

Author: Chris Koerner

Hello! Here's another incomplete round up of activities involving MediaWiki and the surrounding community. Edits and additions are welcome.

• MediaWiki saw both a bug fix release (1.29.1) but also a security please for it and 1.28 and 1.27)
• Semantic MediaWiki saw the release of 2.5.5 since the last round up in August.
• The Maps extension has seen a significant update with version 5.0 and shortly after 5.1.0.
• Updates to the Semantic Results Format (release notes) is also a recent development to keep your eye on!
• Samuel Lampa from the RDFIO project shared a read-made virtual machine with "the latest MediaWiki, SMW and RDFIO installed"
  • RDFIO also saw its 3.0.0 release
• Hallo Welt, makers of BlueSpice MediaWiki have written some useful articles bout Mediawiki skins and related tools:
  • The Top 10 MediaWiki Skins
  • Replace Text - Search and Replace in Your Wiki
  • Draw.io for Mediawiki and Bluespice - Create Drawings Collaboratively
• Semantic MediaWiki Conference (SMWCON) in Rotterdam happened!
• HHVM announced plans to focus on Hack, MediaWiki support was discussed in September.
• The Wikimedia Technical Committee (TechCom) has a newsletter called the TechCom Radar you can subscribe to for meeting notes.
• Speaking of newsletters the Technical Collaboration team has started a brief newsletter showcasing individual software developments as they happen.
• Not to talk too much about work, but the developer relations team is piloting the use of Discourse as a developer support channel. Primarly for developers new to the Wikimedia/MediaWiki movement.
• Yaron Koren, long-time developer and MediaWiki consultant, recently started a new job with Genesys. Congrats to Yaron and we look forward to hear more on what this means for his extensions and the broader MediaWiki community.
• A new MediaWiki forum was created by Ryan Schmidt (Skizzerz)