Or: Why you should stop worrying and love the LTS releases.
TL;DR: Stick to MediaWiki 1.43 LTS, avoid MediaWiki 1.44.
There are two major MediaWiki releases every year, and every fourth such release gets Long Term Support (LTS). Two consistent approaches to upgrading MediaWiki are to upgrade every major release or to upgrade every LTS version. Let’s compare the pros and cons.
Which Upgrade Strategy Is Best
I used to upgrade my wikis for every MediaWiki release, or even run the master (development) branch. Having become more serious about MediaWiki operations by hosting wikis for many customers at Professional Wiki, I now believe sticking to LTS versions is the better trade-off for most people.
Benefits and drawbacks of upgrading every major MediaWiki version (compared to upgrading every LTS version):
- Pro: You get access to all the latest features
- Pro: You might be able to run more modern PHP or operating system versions
- Con: You have to spend effort on upgrades four times as often (twice a year instead of once every two years)
- Con: You have to deal with breaking changes four times as often
- Con: You have to deal with extension compatibility issues four times as often
- Con: You run versions with shorter support windows. Regular major releases are supported for 1 year, while LTS releases receive support for 3 years
What about the latest features? MediaWiki is mature software. Its features evolve slowly, and most innovation happens in the extension ecosystem. Most releases only contain a handful of notable changes, and there is a good chance none of them matter for your use cases. If there is something you would benefit from in a more recent non-LTS major release, then that’s an argument for not sticking to that LTS version, and it’s up to you to determine if that benefit outweighs all the cons. I think it rarely does, with the comparison not even being close.
The Case Of MediaWiki 1.44
MediaWiki 1.44 is the first major MediaWiki release after MediaWiki 1.43 LTS, and at the time of writing this post, it is also the most recent major release.
As with many releases, MediaWiki 1.44 brings several breaking changes to its internal APIs. This means that MediaWiki extensions that work with the previous versions might no longer work with MediaWiki 1.44. This version brings a high number of these breaking changes, including some particularly nasty ones that prevent extensions from easily supporting both MediaWiki 1.43 LTS and MediaWiki 1.44. That means if you upgrade now, you will run into various compatibility problems with extensions.
Examples of the type of errors you will encounter:
PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class “Html” not found
PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class “WikiMap” not found
PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class “Title” not found
Given that most wikis use dozens of MediaWiki extensions, this makes the “You have to deal with extension compatibility issues” con particularly noteworthy for MediaWiki 1.44.
Unless you have specific reasons to upgrade to MediaWiki 1.44, just stick to MediaWiki 1.43 LTS and wait for MediaWiki 1.47 LTS, which will be released around December 2026.
See also: When To Upgrade MediaWiki (And Understanding MediaWiki versions)