- Phabricator:T124671
This is a heads-up note for everyone who gets asked tech questions:
The Ops team is planning a major change to the servers, tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, 22 March 2016 and for Thursday 24th. One probable result is that when this happens, all wikis will be in read-only mode for a short time, likely less than 15 minutes for all editors during those days. You will be able to read pages, but not edit them. "All wikis" means all of the WMF wikis, not just the Wikipedias, and it may affect some related sites, such as mw:Wikimedia Labs (including the Tool Labs). There will also be no non-emergency updates to MediaWiki software around that time.
Many details are still being sorted out, and they will be shared ASAP, but I am asking you to please share the word with your friends and fellow contributors now if you haven't already. This will be mentioned, among other venues, in m:Tech/News (subscribe now! ;-) and through several other channels, but most of the editors here probably don't read this page directly, and even fewer contributors at other projects will see this note. If you are active in other projects or speak other languages, then please share the news with your fellow contributors at other projects, so that whenever it happens, most people will know that everything should be back online in 10 or 15 minutes.
Thanks.