On Sun, 2006-16-04 at 15:52 +0200, Dirk Riehle wrote:
Well, the main solution is to create an ecosystem where people get hired to work (full-time) on providing such extensions (or additions to the mainline) to MediaWiki. Only this setup can provide some continuity.
As far as I know, there are 1-2 programmers working for Wikimedia and more people working at Wikia on MediaWiki. I just talked today with Jack Herrick of wikiHow who'd like to see their additions fed back to MediaWiki.
There are a lot of MW installations out there, and a lot of people hacking MW code for fun and profit.
But for that to work the MediaWiki community needs be accepting of (corporate) contributions (assuming they follow the licenses and community spirit).
I'm pretty sure that this isn't a problem whatsoever. To be sure, the main focus of MW has been and will always be Wikimedia's sites, but I know that the MW team has been very welcoming of patches and additions at least from Wikitravel in the past.
I think the most likely patches and changes to be accepted are going to be security and/or performance patches, or extensions that can be easily plugged and unplugged. Radical changes to the behaviour of the software, or stuff that's "unwiki", or stuff that is unstable or slows down the software, is probably not going to get accepted.
Are there any examples or even defined processes (on meta?) that I could look up?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_extensions
I think just adding a patch to a bug on bugzilla is the fastest way to get something added to the codebase.
~Evan