Cindy Cicalese
| Tags | Innovation, Installation, Open Source, Third Parties |
|---|---|
| Primary Session | Supporting Third-Party Use of MediaWiki |
| Secondary Sessions | Evolving the MediaWiki Architecture, Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community |
How and with whom should we partner to create the technologies needed to support the mission?
A substantial, growing community of MediaWiki users and developers outside the Wikimedia movement has evolved, creating wikis that vary in size, number of editors, number of readers, access restrictions, and activity. The Wikimedia movement benefits from this third party MediaWiki developer and user community's technology contributions and innovation. Similarly, this community benefits from the Wikimedia movement's stewardship of MediaWiki as the foundational technology in support of Wikipedia and its sister projects. There are many areas in which the needs of these two groups are identical, including stable, well-performing software that supports community authoring. Partnering with the third party MediaWiki community will result in a platform that is better for all parties.
How should MediaWiki evolve to support the mission?
There is much knowledge in the world that cannot find its place within Wikipedia or its sister projects. MediaWiki is powerful software crafted especially to support the expression of all knowledge. Third party MediaWiki wikis can provide a home for knowledge that does not belong in Wikipedia, supporting the mission of sharing in the sum of all knowledge. In order for the third party MediaWiki community to continue to thrive and to grow, several impediments to MediaWiki adoption that especially affect that community must be addressed:
- Installing and maintaining all but the smallest and most basic MediaWiki installation currently requires a high level of craftsmanship and expertise.
- While a large number of novel MediaWiki extensions exist to support third party applications, it is difficult to ascertain the level of maturity and support of these extensions.
- Some enterprise consumers require a guaranteed level of support and/or service level agreements before adopting a technology.
- The barrier to entry for those wishing to experiment with MediaWiki in production quality environments is high.
How do we maintain and grow the technical community and ready it for the mission ahead?
The third party MediaWiki community already significantly contributes to the code base. In the last two years, 22% of the commits to MediaWiki core were made by third party contributors, and 62% of the authors of commits to MediaWiki core were third party contributors. Even more striking, in the last two years, 40% of the commits to MediaWiki extensions hosted on gerrit were made by third party contributors, and 67% of the authors of the commits were third party contributors. The third party MediaWiki community is a significant training ground for skilled MediaWiki developers used to tackling a diverse set of challenging problems who sit poised to help forge the path ahead for MediaWiki.
