Hi,
As you may know from previous postings to this list and the Wikimedia Blog, I've been working on a document presenting MediaWiki's architecture. The document will be integrated as a chapter in the second volume of the "Architecture of open-source applications" book.
The reason the Wikimedia Foundation agreed to do this, besides the book, was because we thought that such a document would also prove useful for new developers who want to familiarize themselves with how MediaWiki works. See [1] for more context.
I just finished most of the write-up, based on the input provided by developers, on the documentation on mw.o, on the doxygen doc, and on deep dives into the code.
We'll submit the final draft to the book's editors in about a week, but before that I'd like to ask you guys to review the document. Mostly for accuracy (we don't want to publish something that contains factual errors), but other comments are encouraged as well.
Please try to centralize the feedback on the document's talk page to avoid duplication between the mailing list and the talk page.
You don't have to review everything; if you want to focus on a specific section, that's fine, and I'll be grateful for any help that you provide.
Also, if you find the document useful, please say so on the talk page; it's really difficult to assess the impact of this kind of work, so any feedback will help us determine if we should attempt similar endeavors in the future.
The document is at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_architecture_document/text ; be bold and feel free to edit the page directly, unless the changes are likely to be very disruptive.
Many thanks in advance for your help; I'm available to answer any question on- or offlist.
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_architecture_document