[Foundation-l] [Announce] Brion Vibber to rejoin Wikimedia Foundation

[George Herbert]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 6:58 PM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8 March 2011 00:23, church.of.emacs.ml <church.of.emacs.ml at googlemail.com wrote:
>>
>> >> Lead Architect for the next generation MediaWiki platform
>>
>> I'd really like to hear more about that. Did I miss something or is this
>> a new project? :-)
> I'm quite interested in what that concept entails myself!  Danese talkes
> about "mediawiki.next" in the announcement blogpost, and Brion also goes
> into a bit of detail about the new parser plans in his own blog:
> http://leuksman.com/log/2011/03/07/hotel-mediawiki-you-can-check-out-but-you-can-never-leave/Does
> the "next generation mediawiki platform" have any relationship to the
> concept of the “Strategic Product Department” that was mentioned in passing
> in the recent monthly engineering report (under "review system"
> http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/wikimedia-engineering-february-report/)?

The general concept of a NG has been under discussion on the WMF /
Mediawiki technical lists for some years.  The general approach that
Brion listed has been discussed repeatedly for some years, without
having enough key support / inertia to get actually going - establish
a sane and properly specified subset of the current document
structure, especially around the use of templates; use automatic tools
to identify in-use pages and templates that don't meet that subset,
for people to go to work on fixing by hand; then start rebuilding
tools to take advantage of the specified subset

That the WMF both got Brion back and specifically to do this task is
an excellent step forwards.  It may be a moderately painful year or
two to come, but five years from now we'll all appreciate it.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com