Mark Hershberger
| Tags | Offline Editing, Synchronization, Third Parties |
|---|---|
| Primary Session | Advancing the Contributor Experience |
| Secondary Sessions | Supporting Third-Party Use of MediaWiki |
When Marshall McLuhan said "The medium is the message", he was saying that how the message is understood is affected by what is used to present that message.
MediaWiki is a fundamental part of the medium used to present Wikimedia's work (the "message"). Because the medium is an integral part of the message, it requires comparable attention to its availability and accessibility.
For example, effort is made to ensure that people in remote areas have access to selected content through Kiwix, but a very limited effort has been made to incorporate their knowledge into the "sum of all knowledge."
While there are efforts underway that include copying edits into Wikipedia by hand, it should be possible to provide people in remote areas with an editable copy of Wikipedia so that their edits could be incorporated with less intervention.
Improvements in the installation and resource consumption of a simple MediaWiki installation could be made without sacrificing the current PHP-based application such that someone could, for example, run a current MediaWiki installation an a un-rooted Android phone. Work could then be done to automate the synchronization of that MediaWiki with the current Wikipedia content.
This work on MediaWiki could, of course, be used by other people who use the tool besides the WMF which could create a virtuous cycle that would benefit the Foundation.
In fact, deeply incorporating McLuhan's thinking into WMF culture would mean that, while Wikipedia would remain the most visible product of the Foundation, there would be more room to focus on expanding MediaWiki's capabilities beyond what fits into the current focus on GLAM efforts, the website, etc.
Most of the world does not use Wikipedia every day, but many people use something they've learned as a result of reading from or contributing to Wikipedia every day. Making it easier for people to deploy MediaWiki where the potential users do not have the resources of the WMF (for example, in a place that doesn't have a stable Internet connection) could encourage more people to actively embrace of Wikimedia's vision of freely sharing knowledge.
