Drupal

2 statements.

Author	Tags	Primary Session	Secondary Sessions	Position Statement
David Barratt	API, Drupal, Mobile, Open Source	Evolving the MediaWiki Architecture	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.
Sam Wilson	Drupal, OpenStreetMap, Third Parties, Volunteer Developers, WordPress	Supporting Third-Party Use of MediaWiki	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.