Gregory Szorc wrote:
My questions to the MediaWiki developers are as
follows:
Will features perhaps never desirable for Wikipedia ever be considered for
MediaWiki?
Where nice and clean. Modular extensions are always a huge plus!
Will MediaWiki development ever take a significant
step away from Wikipedia
so drastic overhauls to the core can be made? Right now, MediaWiki development
is mainly implementing features on a production site and spewing them back out
in the form of a new version release. Will this model ever change?
There's been a significant amount of refactoring, rearrangement, and core
changes going on over the years -- mostly done precisely to better support
Wikipedia. I think it's a mistake to think there's nothing big happening.
The big changes are mostly harder to see, to be sure; the 1.4 to 1.5 database
structure change brought *huge* code changes streamlining a lot of old code,
paving the way for improved storage systems, etc, but isn't really visible to an
end-user poking at the site.
Naturally we have some constraints because MediaWiki has to actually work for
some purpose. :) But I think these are good, as they allow us to, well, actually
work. Some big changes happen very quickly, others go on in parallel for some
time before the old code gets dropped (for instance we've dumped the PHPTAL
code, favoring a system that works better for small third-party sites, but
haven't yet replaced all of the old pre-TAL skins).
[snip-a]
In other words, there is a considerable market share
in which
MediaWiki can't even compete.
Of course, MediaWiki does not *have* to compete in other markets. We're not in
*competition* with anybody; I wholeheartedly welcome the existence of other wiki
packages.
But since we do get used for other purposes, it is worth spending some time and
effort to keep them in mind. We've done some things in the past for the
'small'
market: the web installer wizard, replacing the fragile PHPTAL skin, merging Tom
Gries' email notification patches, providing authentication hooks usable for
LDAP and HTTP auth plugins, etc.
Paying some more attention can be good; among other things it'll encourage
cleanup and modularization of existing code. :)
Domas and I are going to be at the MySQL User Conference next month in Santa
Clara; if anyone interested in non-Wikipedia-like use of MediaWiki is going to
be there, that'd be a great time to meet and exchange thoughts and make evil plans.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)