[Foundation-l] MediaWiki 1.7.1 and Wikipedia

[Jeff V. Merkey]

Domas Mituzas wrote:

>Hi Jeff,
>
>Making MediaWiki usable by 3rd parties was Brion's initiative, but it  
>never produced image of mediawiki that would have same feature set  
>like the one we run on live site.
>  
>
Thank you for the thoughtful and informative response.

>Of course, extensions used on live site are available to download,  
>but I'm not sure everyone can have say.. math support on every  
>hosting account. Nor mono with our lucene daemon.
>  
>
Yes, I have all of these and they work.

>On the other hand, we always run a version that is not even released  
>(right now site runs on 1.8), and there are always features on  
>Wikimedia servers that do not exist in rolled out packages.
>  
>
This needs to be reviewed. Running 1.8 on your site is not an issue, but 
creating XML dumps
which are incompatible with released versions is. This is what needs to 
be addressed.

>I don't think php5 is such a menace as you've portrayed, big shops  
>(such as Y!) use it, extensions are more developed for php5 than for  
>php4, it's OO abilities allow more elegant code (and mediawiki is  
>OO'ish), etc.
>
>php5 packages are available for many Linux distributions (some have  
>them in 'testing' branches, though) - I've been running php5 RPM on  
>my Fedora (even FC3) boxes for quite a while.
>  
>
php 5 crashes and is very unstable for a production server without 
patching and
a lot of effort to get it working.

>If you think that distributions should have better support for  
>MediaWiki, you can ask distributions to do that. They started doing  
>mediawiki packages themselves anyway ;-)
>
>Our primary mission is to run website, our secondary mission is to  
>provide software and best practices. And those, surprisingly, include  
>php5 in the list.
>  
>
Well, I would assume that the mission should be to make Wikipedia's 
content pervasive. One simple
fix to this is to provide XML dumps which work with released MediaWiki 
versions. As it stands, from
an external perspective, the current model appears anti-competitive and 
monopolistic (though I as said before,
I do not believe this is intentional).

Please consider providing an XML branch which is compatible with 
released MediaWiki versions. This is
not something that should be negotiable or optional -- it should be 
mandated as a requirement for publishing
dumps .

Jeff

>Domas
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>  
>