On 23/01/07, Virgil Ierubino virgil.ierubino@gmail.com wrote:
What functions would set MediaWiki well above all other wiki engines for years to come?
I believe one of the features that *does* set it above the others, at least in large wiki use cases, is the incredible support it has to scale to millions of simultaneous users all reading, editing, arguing etc. We have support for database replication, a nifty load balancer, support for a number of object caches including memcached, and the smaller, one-machine caches that things like APC and eAccelerator provide. We have extensive support for Squid caches and for appropriate purging of these caches.
To discuss this (what I find an interesting) question, I've set up a page at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Ideal
Why, oh why are people still creating *software* pages on Meta? We've got the http://www.mediawiki.org domain; we're trying to move anything MediaWiki related *away* from Meta, to leave more room for all that Foundation bickering, and so we know where we stand.
I also think this page is a little redundant. We don't want wiki pages cataloguing feature requests; we have a bug/enhancement tracker for that purpose.
Obviously the answers to these questions won't necessarily be possible to implement; but it would be interesting to know the answers nonetheless.
Are you offering to implement some, or at least one of them? When I randomly ask users for feature requests, sometimes they're small and easy, and sometimes I get a flood of ideas which I can't implement right that minute, but it always sets me thinking about possible future enhancement.
Rob Church