Thanks Jeroen, you just reminded me I have a thread here to respond to. I
agree with you points.
I said revamp the mediawiki from ground up because I think the mediawiki
was developed some years ago, and its obvious there are many changes that
have taken effect that need adapting to.
"Revamping" here doesn't mean deleting all the code for mediawiki, and
starting from the first function name { bla bla } thing and coming up.
However I mean sitting back, and spending time to extract the actual
portion that is required for the basic functioning of the wiki, remove the
portions that are not needed, adapt it for today's best practices and
features, and as the word "Revamp" means: *"give new and improved form,
structure, or appearance to."*
The WikiWand guys did a similar thing to the look of Wikipedia, and I think
they're in the right direction. Adapting to changes on the wikis, I think
its one of the hard-to-change things the wikimedia ever want to do, and
same with the MediaWiki system.
Though most of the changes to the WikiWand thing were UI based in
particular, the MediaWiki system can also take a similar approach and
"revamp" things up to improve speed and efficiency, and will give room for
more possibilities, I think.
I think when the media wiki is re-made today, decisions that'll go into it
will be different from the ones made in its beginning.
rexford |
google.com/+Nkansahrexford | sent from smartphone
On Aug 18, 2014 10:17 PM, "Jeroen De Dauw" <jeroendedauw(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hey,
Hi Rexford,
What objectives would we achieve if we were to "revamp the MediaWiki
system
from ground up"? Even if we pretend that we
have infinite financial and
human resources to do this, I am not sure what we would accomplsh, and we
would likely introduce a lot of new reliability and security bugs.
I can't answer for Rexford, though can provide you with a reply of my own.
You are quite right that the resources needed to rewrite a software as big
and complex as MediaWiki from ground up in one go are not realistic. I
think this is simply not feasible and a bad idea to begin with. There is
plenty of good writing on the topic of migrating away from legacy systems,
often cautioning against "the big rewrite".
That does not mean that moving away from the current platform is a bad
idea. Of course there needs to be good reason to do so. Is the current
platform causing problems severe enough to warrant changing direction? Look
at all the effort being put into the software surrounding Wikipedia and
associated projects. A lot of enthusiastic and smart people are spending
plenty of time on it. So how come progress has slowed down so much? How
come we cannot easy add new functionality? What exactly is causing all this
effort to be spend so inefficiently? And how much more would we be able to
achieve if those issues where not there?
One concern with rewriting or redesigning things that I've seen outlined
often is that it is easy to just end up at the same place again. If no
effort is put into identifying why the old system ended up in a bad state,
then it's naive to expect the new one will not suffer the same fate.
and we would likely introduce a lot of new
reliability and security bugs.
Is that something inherent to writing new software or migrating away from
legacy systems? Or is that simply what would happen if such a task was
attempted without altering development practices first?
Cheers
--
Jeroen De Dauw -
http://www.bn2vs.com
Software craftsmanship advocate
Evil software architect at Wikimedia Germany
~=[,,_,,]:3
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