Timo Tijhof
| Tags | Infrastructure, Open Source, User Experience |
|---|---|
| Primary Session | Embracing Open Source Software |
| Secondary Sessions | Evolving the MediaWiki Architecture |
- Embrace open-source and keep our software to the same standards we hold other open-source software. This would prevent our software from becoming isolated, hard to maintain, or hard to contribute to.
- Scale the contributor experience. Ensure our content remains of high quality and value to readers; ultimately to avoid failing our mission. I envision this requires a radical shift in how our application is served, by involving a non-static service capable of scaling to the traffic of our CDN and yet vary responses by user.
Open-source:
We must understand the dangers of producing software that isn't reusable. Such software may be hard to maintain, hard to contribute, both for future contributions, and our future selves.
"Current needs" only exist to serve our long-term needs. Losing track of long-term needs can make software too specific to a current need, risking a trend of releasing software that is only open-source as a courtesy, for transparency, and without being re-usable.
Reusable software has a defined purpose and serves it well. It tends be easy to install, well-documented, and easy to contribute to. Re-use between different services, as well as externally. Such as for community tools, cloud services, or other third parties. Having a defined goal also encourages designing APIs in a way that we can agree not to break or change too often, because they are public.
Scaling:
Our current infrastructure is highly optimised for the passive reader that doesn't contribute. We serve a static CDN response to most users. For users having logged-in, or made contributions, we bypass these layers for all page loads. As a result, their document load time increases by 5x-10x (eg. NavTiming metric responseStart).
In 2015, Ori mentioned the danger of this in (<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/12/29/how-we-made-editing-wikipedia-twice-as-fast/>), saying optimising our backend will "allow us to dissolve the invisible distinction between passive and active users". And "enable microcontribution [features] that draw [in] passive readers".
Banners (CentralNotice) are a good example of our needs being at odds with our infrastructure. We want banners to show as part of the page, and for banners to vary by user, location, plus random variance. Our current infrastructure could only do so by bypassing the CDN on all requests. As such, the current way is entirely client-side and completes well after page load.
In few cases where we do ask readers for data, it is for statistical purposes or to improve the software. Direct (or indirect) contributions to our content remains limited to complex actions like "edit". Moving our contributors experience to match some of the capabilities and performance of the reader experience, would enable us to start accepting micro contributions that actually produce a change in content (either directly, or e.g. by consensus). It also opens the door to making our web platform work offline (e.g. ServiceWorkers) which further enables high-performant interactions that can be uploaded at a later time.
