FIXMEs pre-1.19 are down to about 50 revisions. I sent out an email with Sumana's updated language and, while I don't have any statistics to back it up just yet, I do think that her language was a little more effective than what I've used.
Still, I've had to be more proactive about some relatively minor FIXMEs. Ryan rightly asked “how is this blocking the deployment of 1.19?” I'll tweak the language a smidge to address this concern.
Finally changed the mw:Main page so that it linked to the mw:MediaWiki 1.18 page instead of Sam Reed's mailing list message. This allowed me to link to the FAQ from the page that people end up on to download MediaWiki. I've started to look at mwusers, also to get a feel for the sort of problems people are running into as well.
1.19 Code Review
After discussing this with Robla, I will be taking a much more active role here. This also means that I'll have to do a lot more work in this area. I started by sending personalized emails to people to check in on their code review status and make sure that what they signed up for was a reflection of reality.
Part of getting extensions deployed (as well as getting shell bugs in general resolved) is finding a shell user. After asking for people with shell, I got a list of people (andrew, awjr, aaron, nimish, ryan, faulkner, chad, hashar, reedy, patrick, robla, neil, tim, roan) and will be able to have someone to call on besides Sam in the future.
