[Foundation-l] MediaWiki 1.7.1 and Wikipedia

[Delirium]

Domas Mituzas wrote:

>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>  
>
While I know there are plenty of logistical issues involved, I think 
from the point of view of the Foundation's charitable mission this is 
somewhat of a problem, because the point of producing Wikipedia is not 
just to put up an encyclopedia at *.wikipedia.org, but to produce 
encyclopedia articles that are Free and reusable by anyone.  If the 
articles we distribute are only fully renderable by unreleased software 
or software that's particularly complex to set up and configure, that 
discourages third-party reuse.

Things like the Lucene search are less of an issue, I think; they're 
website infrastructure useful for browsing the encyclopedia, but not 
software that's needed to render the articles correctly.

-Mark