Timwi wrote:

Don't think too far. The payment system for developers is only an experiment, anyway. Nobody knows if it will work out. If it *does* work out, there is certainly no reason not to use the same system to reward work on actual articles -- but let's concentrate on one side of it first.

So, I think we need to unask the question about how to pay developers to do work for the foundation, and think about how to make MediaWiki development faster and easier.

One thing to note is that MediaWiki _is_ a very active, vibrant project. It's gone through a lot of changes this year, and will probably continue to.

That said, here are my suggestions for making MediaWiki a more agile piece of software:

1. Go Open Source. I know, the software is GPL-licensed right now, but we're not using Open Source methods to get contributions from outside Wikimedia. I think I'm the only developer whose primary wiki project isn't a Wikimedia one. There are a lot of wikis using MediaWiki, and we need to be drawing talent and contributions from developers outside the Foundation framework.

2. Re-architect for comprehension. The software, as it stands, is really, really complicated. This comes somewhat from the inherent complexity of having a wiki, but it also comes from an accumulative development process. It's hard to figure out how to implement a new feature or fix a bug, because it's really hard to figure out what modules are responsible for what functionality.

3. Re-architect for extensibility. In a lot of ways, MediaWiki is more like a first-generation "wiki script" than more modern wiki software. MediaWiki compares unfavorably to other wiki software such as MoinMoin or Twiki in the ability of third-party developers to create extension modules for the software. Hell, it's hard just to change the _skin_ on MediaWiki. Extensibility means that outside developers can doing cutting-edge experiments, and we can incorporate (or ignore) those modules at a later time.

~ESP