Sam Wilson
| Tags | Drupal, OpenStreetMap, Third Parties, Volunteer Developers, WordPress |
|---|---|
| Primary Session | Supporting Third-Party Use of MediaWiki |
| Secondary Sessions | Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community |
tldr: Encourage use of MediaWiki outside WMF projects, because does so furthers the mission (and improves the software).
MediaWiki is primarily a tool that helps the Wikimedia movement. The movement is not primarily about MediaWiki, but MediaWiki is the central tool with which we are currently fulfilling our mission. Lots of other people use MediaWiki too, but their needs are not the focus of WMF development. I think we should do more to encourage 3rd party use of MediaWiki, and in doing so broaden the developer community and end up with higher-quality software that is easier to use for more people.
Our mission is about empowerment and education, and people running their own wikis should be seen as part of that. Just because content isn't hosted on WMF servers doesn't mean it's not part of the movement. I imagine a future in which MediaWiki is as common for collaborative websites as WordPress is for blogs, and people don't have to rely on Facebook, YouTube, GitHub, etc. to host their content.
A couple of parallels (sort of):
- OpenStreetMap hosts the central database of their map, but they actively discourage people doing anything other than editing on the OSM infrastructure. Instead, there is a large ecosystem of tools and systems for serving that data. This is mainly because it would be impossible for OSM to provide the bandwidth and required formats etc. for all the possible uses - similarly, the set of Wikimedia sister projects are never going to provide every wiki that people want.
- Automattic runs wordpress.com and also manages the opensource development of WordPress; the latter seemingly in conflict with the former, but because of the long history (and relative late-starting of wordpress.com perhaps) the software has remained a favorite of self-hosted websites. (I'm ignoring the obvious security arguments for a now.)
One reason that MediaWiki is not better for 3rd party users could be that there are not all that many non-WMF people making a living out of developing for it, at least not in comparison with other web frameworks (Drupal, WordPress, etc.). WordPress had to be easy to install on cheap web hosts because that's all there was; MediaWiki seems these days to only have that characteristic as a historical hangover, and it could well end up moving away from being aimed at amateur sysadmins all together.
Perhaps there's a fundamental clash between the scale requirements of the WMF sites vs. the ease-of-administration requirements of 3rd party wikis - but if there's a choice to be made, it should be explicit and well-communicated. At the moment, it feels like it's happening by attrition.
