After 18 months of MediaWiki release management handled externally by Markus Glaser and Mark Hershberger, we have agreed to bring the MediaWiki release work back to the Wikimedia Foundation. From now on, the Release Engineering team coordinated by Greg Grossmeier, which is responsible for the WMF weekly releases, will be also in charge of the MediaWiki releases for third parties. This will be a hit on the WMF Release Engineering team initially, but we plan to make future announcements related to that.
About two years ago we explored the outsourcing of MediaWiki releases under the assumption that an external team not conditioned to the Wikimedia priorities would be in a better spot to satisfy the needs of third party MediaWiki users. Over time, this assumption has been overshadowed by the overhead required to keep both release teams in sync, and the difficulties that Mark y Markus have run into when trying to follow the weekly release train. We believe that the situation would be similar with any other external team, so we have decided to go back to in-house releases.
Another lesson learned by all of us is that managing MediaWiki releases and promoting a MediaWiki ecosystem are very different specialized tasks, and it is hard to be the individuals in charge of both. Both Mark and Markus were active in the MediaWiki community well before managing MediaWiki releases, and will continue to be active now in the context of the MediaWiki Stakeholders Group, as volunteers and with their own stakeholders' hats. The Engineering Community team, coordinated by Quim Gil, will offer their help in consolidating the Group and aligning their interests with the WMF plans.
The Wikimedia Foundation thanks Mark, Markus, and Alexis for the work done releasing MediaWiki and coordinating several community activities in the context of the MediaWiki Stakeholders Group. While we are aware of the disruption that this change of strategy might bring, we believe that the new situation puts us all in a better position to support the needs of the MediaWiki community.
This change of course is also a good chance to discuss what is the best mid-term scenario for MediaWiki outside of Wikimedia, and what should we all do in order to get there. The MediaWiki Developer Summit in San Francisco next week is a good place to have this conversation, in addition of our usual online channels, of course.
Markus Glaser, Mark Hershberger, Alexis T. Hershberger, Greg Grossmeier, Quim Gil