David Barratt
| Tags | API, Drupal, Mobile, Open Source |
|---|---|
| Primary Session | Evolving the MediaWiki Architecture |
| Secondary Sessions | Supporting Third-Party Use of MediaWiki |
The Mission
In a Wikimedia cultural orientation, the moderator instructed the class by explaining that 'technology is not part of our mission, technology is only a means to an end.' While it may be appropriate to use digital technology in order to disseminate free educational content effectively and globally, the existence of Wikimedia Technology is not strictly part of Wikimedia's mission. Wikimedia is therefore stuck in a precarious position of maintaining a large open source software project only as a means to an end. This produces a double-minded mentality within the movement: satisfying the mission versus satiating a massive software operation. It is with this understanding that Wikimedia ought to consider partnering with an existing open source community in order to evolve MediaWiki to support the mission, maintain and grow the technical community, and build technologies necessary for embracing mobility.
While Wikimedia's mission statement does not cover technology, the mission (https://www.drupal.org/about/mission-and-principles) of Drupal 'is to build the best open source content management framework.' In addition, Drupal is more than capable of handling all of Wikimedia's traffic needs and is flexible and modular enough to allow us to implement all of MediaWiki's features in a UI and API backwards-compatible way. In fact, every feature of Drupal core is an extension and every extension is a first-class citizen that has full control over every aspect of Drupal. Perhaps the next major version of MediaWiki ought to be a collection of Drupal extensions that can be run independently and are also available in a pre-configured 'MediaWiki' distribution of Drupal (https://www.drupal.org/project/project_distribution).
The primary user of MediaWiki is, by far, Wikimedia. While the software can be run by others outside of Wikimedia, it's usage outside of Wikimedia is extremely low (https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/MediaWiki). Because of the low adoption rate, it is difficult to gain any users outside of Wikimedia. As a result, there are very few developers outside of the movement that contribute towards its development and almost no outside financial commitment to the project. In contrast, Drupal's usage within the top 1,000 websites is 14 times (https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Drupal) that of MediaWiki. 'The Drupal community is one of the largest (https://www.drupal.org/about/mission-and-principles) open source communities in the world.' By building MediaWiki on top of Drupal, Wikimedia would be tapping into a user and developer base that is substantially larger than MediaWiki's. Wikimedia would be assisting Drupal in their mission and Drupal would be helping Wikimedia in theirs.
Drupal is committed (https://dri.es/drupal-is-api-first-not-api-only) to an API-first strategy. This strategy has enabled Drupal to expose all of its resources in a consumable, highly-cacheable API. They believe strongly in this strategy, because it's part of their mission, and in doing so, helps others like Wikimedia achieve the mission on a global scale. By embracing the API-first strategy, Wikimedia would propel its mobile development into the future.
To further Wikimedia's mission, the foundation should consider using Drupal as the foundation of its software. Doing so would facilitate evolving MediaWiki to support the mission, maintaining and growing the technical community, and building technologies necessary for embracing mobility.
