Markus Glaser
| Tags | Code Review, Documentation, Gadgets, Software Development Practices, Templates, Third Parties |
|---|---|
| Primary Session | Extension Installation and Dependency Management |
| Secondary Sessions | Session:4, Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community |
Mediawiki needs a professional ecosystem
There is a huge potential for MediaWiki development outside of the Foundation's organized tech world. Thousands of organisations are running MediaWiki on the internet or intranet. They are investing time and money to make it their platform for information sharing, knowledge management or collaborative work. Yet, a lot of the development and design work stays contained on those installations instead of being published and provided to the greater MediaWiki community. I think this is not because of seclusiveness of the authors, but because we make it hard for externals to contribute.
So how can we tap into this potential? I think there are a number of measures we can take. Among others, these are:
- Support standard ways for code contribution. For example, a lot of developers do have a github account, and know the github workflow of forking and requesting pulls. However, there is currently no way for them to contribute their code directly, instead they have to set up with our gerrit infrastructure. This is a hurdle many will not take.
- Maintain extensions as a community. There are a lot of extensions which are not actively maintained by their authors. In order to get them working, you have to wait for the maintainer to +2 your code. Although I have +2 rights, it is not clear under which circumstances I should actually +2 code, nor is there a general review queue for extensions. We can establish a group of volunteers who review changes to extensions on a regular basis.
- Create a template and gadget repository. A lot of work goes into site customisation using gadgets, templates or on-site-CSS. There are brilliant solutions out there, but we do not have a structured way to centrally collect this content or even curate it.
- Make it attractive for professional developers and consultants build their projects on top of MediaWiki. For example by increasing the visibility of highly used extensions on MediaWiki.org, by providing good entry points for technical documentation or by adding automated quality checks to the extensions.
There are already some initiatives pursuing the general goal of fostering an ecosystem, e.g. MediaWiki Stakeholders or the recently announced Enterprise MediaWiki Consortium. Together with the Foundation, they can encourage MediaWiki maintainers to contribute their ideas and code and be part of the MediaWiki world.
