zocky wrote: I'm primarily supportive of (B). I have no problems with MediaWiki being accessible for other users, because if it is, then we'll attract more developer talent, which is a good thing. But I think our primary focus ought to be support of the encyclopedia project. --Jimbo

Zocky> A) MediaWiki is a general purpose wiki infrastructure, [...] Zocky> B) MediaWiki is support infrastructure for Wikipedia. [...] JW> I'm primarily supportive of (B). I have no problems with JW> MediaWiki being accessible for other users, because if it is, JW> then we'll attract more developer talent, which is a good JW> thing. So, actually, this may come as a surprise, but I support B), too. I don't think we'd be using MediaWiki for Wikitravel if it was a more general-purpose Wiki engine. What's good for making an encyclopedia turns out to be good for making a travel guide. That's why we picked MediaWiki in the first place. That said, I think some level of generalization (say, extracting config stuff into LocalSettings.php, extracting strings into LanguageXX.php) has made MediaWiki into a better piece of software -- even if it were run _only_ for English-language Wikipedia, ever. I don't do admin on larousse or pliny, but I'm pretty sure it's easier to tweak a single message in LanguageXX.php than to do a search-and-replace for some string in umpteen source files. And turning off expensive functionality under high load seems to have been valuable, too. So, some of the features of MediaWiki that are for generalization actually help English-language Wikipedia proper, too. I also think it makes new Wikimedia projects (other-language Wikipedias, new projects) relatively low-cost in terms of time and effort to start up. That's probly a good thing. designs in MediaWiki be _at_least_ configurable to be turned off. But in the worst-case scenario we could maintain custom local patches. Not optimal, but possible. Anyways, here's my point: if there's something that's right for Wikipedia, and you're worried it might not be right for downstream projects, well... Go for it. We'll cope. But! if it's not right for us, it _might_ not be right for Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects. So it's a good thing to think through. ~ESP -- Evan Prodromou <evan(a)wikitravel.org> Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/ The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide