Hi all,
a few of us have recently collected and roughly prioritized some open
architectural questions [1]. The area that stood out as needing most urgent
attention is adapting our content platform to long-term changes in the way
users interact with our site [2]. People are using a wider range of
devices, from feature phones to multi-core desktops. Many users are looking
for short factoids and definitions, while others prefer to immerse
themselves in detailed articles with rich multimedia content.
MediaWiki is currently not very optimized to support such a diverse set of
use cases. To address this, we see a need to improve our platform in the
following areas:
- Storage: To better separate data from presentation, we need the
ability to store multiple bits of content and metadata associated with each
revision. This storage needs to integrate well with edits, history views,
and other features, and should be exposed via a high-performance API.
- Change propagation: Edits to small bits of data need to be reliably
and efficiently propagated to all content depending on it. The machinery
needed to track dependencies should be easy to use.
- Content composition and caching: Separate data gives us the freedom to
render infoboxes, graphs or multimedia elements dynamically, depending on
use case and client. For performance and flexibility, it would be desirable
to assemble at least some of these renders as late as possible, at the edge
or on the client.
We don't expect to tackle all of this at once, but are starting to look
into several areas. If you are interested in helping, then we would like to
invite you to join us for a kick-off meeting:
*When: Tuesday, June 23rd, 13:00 - 14:30 PT [3]*
*Where: *A *hangout* link will be posted here before the meeting; room 37
in the office.
If you can't attend, then please have a look at our current notes and let
us know what you think [2].
Gabriel Wicke, Daniel Kinzler, Brion Vibber, Tim Starling, Roan Kattouw,
Ori Livneh
[1]:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96903
[2]:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T99088
[3]:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=MediaWiki+content+…