Mass-abandonment of many 2+-year-old Gerrit patches to mediawiki/core

Earlier today (2026-03-30), all unmerged Gerrit patches to `mediawiki/core` that were both attached to a Phabricator task & were 2+ years old appear to have been abandoned _en masse_: [0]

There was a small amount of discussion after-the-fact in IRC (#wikimedia-releng): [1]

I am emailing wikitech-l to announce this myself, as it does not seem like this was done by the folks involved in making/actioning this decision. Speaking personally, I am saddened that it is apparently the case that there was no prior communication about today's action to the Wikimedia technical community, and that there was no (or, at least, no _recent_) consultation with the wider technical community prior to this highly impactful mass-action taking place.

>From the current Gerrit search results at [2] (as viewed while typing this email - I'm not sure if Gerrit's search allows for filtering by the time a patch was abandoned), it appears that this action may have affected ~500-530 individual patches.

There was a Phabricator task filed in May 2025 that proposed the automatic abandonment of old changes; however, at the time of this action being taken, there had been no comments on that task since May 2025. [3]

Speaking personally again -- I wish that this hadn't happened. I wish there had been (wider, and more recent) community consultation. I wish that - at the very least - the voices expressing concern in the 'auto-abandonment' task [3] had been listened and responded to. That they weren't saddens me greatly: why should people take the time to express their concerns regarding suggested wide-scale changes such as this, if such concerns won't even be acknowledged prior to this sort of mass-action being taken?
Given (e.g.) the thesis quoted in Tyler Cipriani's comment at [4], I am also especially concerned about what this sort of action may mean for the future health of MediaWiki & other Wikimedia software projects.

I do now hope that these changes can be mass-restored, in the same way that they were mass-abandoned; at least, until further community discussion on the matter can take place. (But that, I recognise, is an opinion that not everyone may necessarily share.)

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[0] https://sal.toolforge.org/log/QS3ePp0B8tZ8Ohr0YH3W
[1] https://wm-bot.wmcloud.org/browser/index.php?start=03%2F30%2F2026&end=03%2F30%2F2026&display=%23wikimedia-releng#:~:text=!log%20gerrit%3A%20abandon,Txxxx%60)
[2] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/project:mediawiki/core+is:abandoned+before:%222026-03-30+14:00:00%22+after:%222026-03-30+12:50:00%22,500
[3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T393376
[4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T393376#10831729

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-- a smart kitten
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/p/A_smart_kitten/