On 10/01/2013 09:25 AM, Brion Vibber wrote:
We've been moving away from being friendly to old-style shared-hosting servers for some time with key features that people are going to expect to replicate on their MediaWikis in the future...
Fair enough.
If WMF were the only user of MW, you could freely decide to take MW it whatever direction you choose. But doing that now without considering the needs of other MW users isn't responsible.
Not everyone needs to run Wikipedia and it is a worthwhile effort to make sure MediaWiki remains scalable down to the shared-hosting level.
On 10/01/2013 09:56 AM, Chad wrote:
I'd like to echo everything Brion said here. I think we were just talking about this last week or the week before, right?
You and Brion talked about this? I don't recall any conversation on wikitech-l about abandoning support for the "little guy".
Before a decision like this is made (and I would like people like David Gerard of RationalWiki to continue to weigh in, not just WMF employees), I would like to get some actual statistics on the number of shared hosting users. How are they running their sites? Do larger wikis have the time and the budget to support this sort of move?
Perhaps WMF should just fork off their own "enterprise" branch of MW?
It would be good to discuss this on mediawiki-l, too.