Innovation
2 statements.
| Author | Tags | Primary Session | Secondary Sessions | Position Statement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cindy Cicalese | Innovation, Installation, Open Source, Third Parties | Supporting Third-Party Use of MediaWiki | 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. |
| Gergő Tisza | Collaboration, Hosting, Incubator, Infrastructure, Innovation | Supporting Third-Party Use of MediaWiki |
We need a wikiproject incubator to enable innovation We need infrastructure for cheap creation of new wikis and experimentation with new project types and their different technical and social needs. Wikipedia was an unlikely bet that paid off extremely well. It does not cover the entirety of human knowledge however - it's limited to long-form, text-based representations of encyclopedic topics on subjects well covered by reliable sources. There have been recurring discussions in the past about covering new types of knowledge (genealogy, fact checking, 3D models, oral history, collaborative video etc. etc.) but they never went anywhere, because creating new projects is a lot of work and the outcome is unpredictable (some things only work in practice), so the WMF was unwilling to take the risk. If we want to make meaningful progress on our vision of curating the sum of *all* knowledge, and truly become the infrastructure of free knowledge, we need to overcome this barrier. We need infrastructure for low-effort, low-risk experimentation with new projects - a "wiki nursery". A system where new wikis can be created at minimal cost, technical and social experiments can be performed on them without undue risk to other projects, and they can be discarded if they prove unsuccessful. Other organizations have used such mechanisms with great success (Wikia has tens of thousands of wikis; Stack Exchange has nearly two hundred sites). Such a system has to be somewhat separate from the existing wiki cluster; a closely integrated approach like incubator.wikimedia.org is both too inflexible and too insecure. It needs to have some level of operational and legal maturity (more than what Cloud VPS offers). For risk segregation and eficiency, it would have to be different from our production cluster in a number of ways:
While there is a significant one-time cost to setting up such a system, keeping it running is cheap, and the benefits are well worth it - information on what content types and what policies enable productive collaboration, a space free of the conservativism and change aversion of large established projects where new concepts can prove themselves, an entry point for projects with a less western-centric interpretation of knowledge, lots of small projects which are welcoming to new editors and provide lots of low-hanging fruit for contribution. (Also, the same feature set is needed for paid wiki hosting service, which is one way to create non-WMF income streams into the MediaWiki software ecosystem - a valid strategic goal on its own.) |
