* Neil Kandalgaonkar neilk@wikimedia.org [Wed, 29 Dec 2010 14:40:13 -0800]:
Thanks... I know this is a provocative question but I meant it just as it was stated, nothing more, nothing less. For better or worse my history with the foundation is too short to know the answers to these questions.
All the assumptions in my question are up for grabs, including the assumption that we're even primarily developing MediaWiki for WMF projects. Maybe we think it's just a good thing for the world and
that's
that.
Anyway, I would question that it doesn't take a lot of effort to keep the core small -- it seems to me that more and more of the things we
use
to power the big WMF projects are being pushed into extensions and templates and difficult-to-reproduce configuration and even data
entered
directly into the wiki, commingled indistinguishably with documents.
(As
you are aware, it takes a lot of knowledge to recreate Wikipedia for a testing environment. ;)
Meanwhile, MediaWiki is perhaps too powerful and too complex to administer for the small organization. I work with a small group of artists that run a MediaWiki instance and whenever online
collaboration
has to happen, nobody in this group says "Let's make a wiki page!"
That
used to happen, but nowadays they go straight to Google Docs. And that has a lot of downsides; no version history, complex to auth
credentials,
lack of formatting power, can't easily transition to a doc published
on
a website, etc.
MediaWIki wasn't always so complex. The first version, I've used in 2007 (1.9.3) was reasonably simpler than current 1.17 / 1.18 revisions. And one might learn it gradually, step by step in many months or even years. Besides of writing extensions for various clients, I do use it for my own small memo / blog, where I do put code samples, useful links (bookmarking) and a lot of various texts (quotations and articles to read later).
To me, a standalone MediaWiki on a flash drive sounds like a good idea. However, there are many limitations, although SQLite support have become much better and there is a Nanoweb http server; some computers might already listen to 127.0.0.1:80. I wish it was possible to run a kind of web server with system sockets, or even no sockets at all, however browsers probably do not support this :-( Otherwise, one should pre-run a port scanner (not a very good thing). Dmitriy