-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Kasimir Gabert wrote: For the record, a fine open-source implementation of ASP.NET exists in Mono. We're not terribly likely to wander over to it, though. - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)

I beg your pardon, Rob, but this was really quite rude. This mailing list isn't a private elite club, is it? People interested in the Wikimedia Foundation's goals are all allowed to voice their opinions right? Isn't that the Wikimedia ethos? I am not creeping onto your forums ("your" forums!), how dare you. I am not trying to usurp anything. I'm genuinely interested in Wikimedia. Just for the record, I'm a 20-year-old philosophy student at Trinity College, Cambridge - not a dot-com business man rubbing his hands together looking for cash. I don't actually think I could write something on my own anyway. Nor am I trying to jump in and scream that all your base are belong to me. It's just that I have so many ideas for a better wiki engine that it would be almost ridiculous to suggest them as additions to MediaWiki. They comprise a new engine in themselves (one that would obviously be written to work with any MediaWiki database), and I was just wondering which languages were preferred for an implementation so that I could scale any suggestions I made to that. As for the "obsession with MediaWiki 2.0", I'm keen, sure. I think a major upgrade to the software would really help the Foundation's goals. I'm keen on the Foundation. It follows. On 06/03/07, Rob Church <robchur(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 06/03/07, Rob Church <robchur(a)gmail.com> wrote: No I haven't put forward the ideas yet because this thread was intended merely to ask about what technologies were suitable. I'm scaling my suggestions and ideas to the answers. Well said. Any "rewrites" would obviously have begun with the original MediaWiki, changed bits here and there - both core and trivial bits - and added lots. But as a few others on the thread have pointed out, in genuinely creating an engine with features that are a superset of the current MediaWiki, you'd basically be adding onto the current code anyway. The end result would be the same as if it had been done with incremental integration. So I guess major rewrites are silly after all - I just have lots of ideas for additions and changes, then. The reason I suggested a rewrite was that I've heard over and over how the code is terribly difficult and messy, and is a bit dodgy. For instance, the parser (I'm told) is a set of regular expressions, and whilst this works it does not make it easy to add to the syntax, change syntaxes, can be buggy, etc etc. It would be good if the parser worked by generating a genuine DOM tree for the document, and then translating that into the output. This is just one example of where (I've heard that) a core part of the software needs major reworking. Another reason for a rewrite (of some core parts) is that MediaWiki was written when Wikipedia first began, but the uses and functions of Wikipedia - and other projects - today, were very much unforeseen back then, so the software wasn't streamlined for those functions. It seems we keep having to work around the software to achieve simple things in a difficult way - e.g. voting/commenting pages on Wikipedia (Featured Article Candidates, for instance), which are a very simple idea, become difficult for new users to understand and contribute to. If these were streamlined directly from the core code, (add your comment/vote forms, etc), this commonplace function would work much better.

On 06/03/07, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote: Sure sure, I didn't realise I was conversing with a group of super elite hax0r programmers. I'm a novice with ASP .NET and various other languages, better with PHP, but fully fledged in other stuff like Visual Basic. I do know what makes good programming. As far as being an elite programmer, I don't cut it because I still enjoy rapid development platforms like VB. Ease is good to me when writing. But by this I certainly don't mean to sacrifice quality, structured and bugless code. Nevertheless, I wasn't suggesting I did any MW coding myself *anyway*, so why all this fuss?

On 06/03/07, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino(a)gmail.com> wrote: You've heard this over and over. Have you actually looked at it? Sometime either just before or just after Christmas or New Year (don't recall which), I had an interesting little discussion with Tim Starling, where we came to the conclusion, to some extent, that a lot of the code base had significantly improved over a period of months - thanks in no small part to the tremendous refactoring effort of a number of developers. Yes, that's quite correct. You haven't, it seems, been taking part in the other threads where this keeps getting discussed, however. The current problem is to define our parser's behaviour, which is proving to be a stressful and difficult task. No, Wikipedia began in 2001. MediaWiki as it is now has been around since ~ 2003. You run the risk of upsetting large numbers of people who believe such things are not "votes"...however, I don't like to do the politics dance, so that's all I'll say on that aspect. I don't see that it would be too hard to write a decent extension to do proper polling; you could have a fancy custom "poll" namespace, pages in which would appear as polls, rather than conventional articles, with ordinary (for some definition of ordinary) talk pages to aid discussion. I say "some definition of ordinary" above because you must also have missed the tremendous work that David McCabe put in to developing LiquidThreads as part of his Summer of Code work. Dave's effort was superb, and I liked all the betas I saw...at the moment, development has stopped, although I heard rumours Wikia was going to ask him to continue the work. In my view, Wikimedia must absolutely get this one back on the tracks again as soon as possible. Before I get to my flamboyant little finish; someone's mentioned AJAX in this thread. That's all well and good, and AJAX is useful when applied appropriately, consistently and *done properly*...so have a rummage around for my previous opinion-bashing on that one. All in all, though, it looks like you're merely blissfully ignorant of a lot of discussions and "what if" thinking going on in the background. That's not necessarily a problem, but when you start whipping out talk of a rewrite without realising how much we *are* discussing things, then it becomes a little unnerving. I can guarantee that pretty much every user we have has his or her own pet little wish list for things that we "should" add to the software. I can guarantee that a lot of them will overlap, e.g. single sign-on, which some are saying will herald the Second Coming, WYSIWYG, etc. These features would be nice, and will happen, given Linus' law, but what people have got to realise is there are several prerequisites to us implementing these. Every time we have to stop and explain this sort of thing, it pauses our efforts in doing so. Nevertheless, your enthusiasm for the Foundation's future, goals and missions will earn you many allies on this and other mailing lists, and you seem to be here to bounce ideas off people, which is one of the purposes of this list. So, welcome aboard. Rob Church

On 3/6/07, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino(a)gmail.com> wrote: Not really. Modularity is a good thing. It allows people to turn off unneeded functionality to achieve speed boosts, or remove things they don't want their users to use for some reason (maybe someone really hates galleries).

amount of the functionality provided by extensions. It is much easier to replace the functionality of an extension with the functionality of a similar extension than it is to replace the functionality of something in the core code. It also means less complexity in the software, which (generally) makes it more secure. That is also one less thing I have to worry about disabling if I decide I don't want it. Authentication plugins are a prime example. There are a million different authentication systems out there, and at any given point in time I may decide it is best to use another one. If it wasn't for the wonderful plugin system provided by the software, it would be very hard to move to a different authentication system on a whim (or when your architecture changes). being written as extensions, because that means I can hook into the code and change functionality far easier than I could otherwise. Extensibility is a good thing! (on a side note, I love the idea of class hijacking hooks mentioned in the "Massive Hooks Proposal" chain) V/r, Ryan Lane

On 3/6/07, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well, two things here. First of all, "obviously be written to work with any MediaWiki database" is not at all obvious, and borders on impossible. There are a huge number of little quirks and corner cases in the code, especially in the parser, that people will have come to expect and rely upon even if they weren't originally intended. Reproducing every single one of those is impossible and probably not even desirable, but it should be borne in mind that a rewrite will *never* behave the same way as the original except broadly. Second of all, to achieve even approximately the same functionality, so that people could carry on what they were doing without having to go through major adaptation, you will quite literally have to rewrite every line individually into your new language of choice, test to make sure there aren't glaring problems, and then refactor the code if you like. Essentially, to keep the same featureset you'll basically need to keep the same codebase, and in that case, all your improvements will have to be incremental anyway. So you may as well make the incremental changes in PHP. On 3/6/07, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well, I never said *that*. IMO you should go with Python or something if you wanted to rewrite MW. (Of course, the downside there is that then all the Perl-lovers will hate MediaWiki *and* its developers eternally, whereas now everyone can loathe the language it's written in in total harmony, but there's always a cost.) But as stated, it's probably not a good idea to rewrite MW.

On 06/03/07, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote: Even more passionate than the dear old Foundation are most of its users, who will see ".aspx" and start blogging about the Microsoft takeover. Rob Church

On 06/03/07, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote: I never seriously thought I could write a whole engine as good as MW on my own! But thanks for the replies now. You've managed to answer my question - sticking with PHP is, I'm sure, the way to go. I'll have to look into how to use AJAX with that. For the record again, I'm trying to work out these coding concepts so I can make my suggestions sensibly.

Virgil Ierubino wrote: If you want to do something at least as good as the current engine, you will need to understand how it works. To understand it you will need to understand PHP. When you finish doing it, you will be able to write php code too, so you won't need to stuck with aspx ;)

... must ... resist .... flamebait .... On 3/6/07, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 06/03/07, Ivan Krstić <krstic(a)solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> wrote: I don't think I actually mentioned writing this myself did I? Yes I understand that, but I wasn't actually sure what to call the language. ASP .NET? Like I say, I've never claimed to be a whizz on the coding. I have a basic understanding of how the technologies all work and what they can do, so I'm working off that to make more sensible suggestions... when I do.

Hello Sebastian, MediaWiki is not just run on Wikimedia Foundation servers. If MediaWiki were to use a proprietory but "better" solution, then I am relatively positive that many of the wikis out there running Linux and open source operating systems would immediately drop MediaWiki. Kasimir On 3/6/07, Sebastian Moleski <sebmol(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Kasimir Gabert

On 06/03/07, Ivan Krstić <krstic(a)solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> wrote: Please refer to the part of my message where I emphasised that **I never mentioned writing anything myself**. "Hysterical raisins" was done on purpose, right?