The OSM Wiki will be in read-only mode on 26 April to upgrade to Debian 12 and MediaWiki 1.43.x. The upgrade is expected to take up to 8 hours.
2025-04-26T09:00:00Z→2025-04-26T17:00:00Z
During this time, you’ll be able to read the wiki and look up documentation inside iD, but you won’t be able to edit any pages or data items. Please plan your edits accordingly.
The operations team completed the upgrade several hours ago. The upgrade from MediaWiki v1.39 to v1.43 comes with a number of changes, mostly behind the scenes. The most notable change is support for dark mode – but now we need help fixing individual pages and templates. Artistically inclined wiki editors may also be interested in new support for the filter property in CSS. See the v1.42 and v1.43 release notes for details.
hmmm, well I posted in the crosslinked thread below your comment and a number of pages, one ** pretty critical to my daily road mapping, have gone unreachable in any browser I try (much prefer firefox on the desktop). That can’t have been the intend.
** In past I generated searchble PDF copy of the Italian road signs wiki as it was always slow because of the countless images, but had not for this one… me bad.
Continuing the discussion from:
Following the upgrade, the cache of images from Wikimedia Commons needs to be repopulated as each page is requested for the first time. This is relatively time-consuming, and Wikimedia’s servers often throttle the wiki’s server’s IP address. This is compounded by the sheer complexity and number of images on any traffic sign catalog page, and Wikimedia is getting stricter due to excessive traffic from the scrapers that power the world’s beloved AI chatbots. As if that isn’t enough, said scrapers are hammering our wiki directly as well.
I applaud your restraint in wording the situation with the scrapers
Yes, it appears to be fallout from the upgrade. It affected any invocation of {{tag}} that resulted in an interwiki link, such as for operator:wikidata=Q…. I’ve fixed the issue and added a test case to more easily spot the issue in the future.
