Just out of curiosity, what is the current thinking among developers? Is it more:
A) MediaWiki is a general purpose wiki infrastructure, which also runs Wikipedia. Developers of MediaWiki should concentrate on making the best possible software and editors of Wikipedia should take advantage of new features as they're provided.
B) MediaWiki is support infrastructure for Wikipedia. Editors of Wikipedia should decide what kind of behaviour and which features Wikipedia needs and developers of MediaWiki should implement them.
~~~~ zocky
zocky wrote:
A) MediaWiki is a general purpose wiki infrastructure, which also runs Wikipedia. Developers of MediaWiki should concentrate on making the best possible software and editors of Wikipedia should take advantage of new features as they're provided.
B) MediaWiki is support infrastructure for Wikipedia. Editors of Wikipedia should decide what kind of behaviour and which features Wikipedia needs and developers of MediaWiki should implement them.
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
"JW" == Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com writes:
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.
From a selfish standpoint, I'd _prefer_ to have new features or
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
On Dec 20, 2003, at 05:30, zocky wrote:
A) MediaWiki is a general purpose wiki infrastructure, which also runs Wikipedia. Developers of MediaWiki should concentrate on making the best possible software and editors of Wikipedia should take advantage of new features as they're provided.
B) MediaWiki is support infrastructure for Wikipedia. Editors of Wikipedia should decide what kind of behaviour and which features Wikipedia needs and developers of MediaWiki should implement them.
C) MediaWiki's primary user is Wikipedia and most of the developers are Wikipedians. We do want to be easy to setup and use generally, but most of us are going to be working on what we think would be good for Wikipedia. As volunteers in our spare time, none of us are bound to implement behaviors and features that other people think would be nice, whether on Wikipedia or not.
Others' opinions may vary of course; Evan runs Wikitravel for instance and may have different particular interests.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On Sat, Dec 20, 2003 at 02:30:17PM +0100, zocky wrote:
Just out of curiosity, what is the current thinking among developers? Is it more:
A) MediaWiki is a general purpose wiki infrastructure, which also runs Wikipedia. Developers of MediaWiki should concentrate on making the best possible software and editors of Wikipedia should take advantage of new features as they're provided.
B) MediaWiki is support infrastructure for Wikipedia. Editors of Wikipedia should decide what kind of behaviour and which features Wikipedia needs and developers of MediaWiki should implement them.
B, definitely
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org