On Thu, Aug 19, 2021 at 1:51 PM Amir Sarabadani <ladsgroup(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I know Wikispore is not big right now but (as a
Cassandra) I highly
recommand not using this extension. It's a security nightmare with lots and
lots of scalability issues (I've seen second-handed). Worse than DPL and
SMW. If Wikispore is planning to be in WMF production eventually, I highly
doubt it would be able to get there with Cargo.
Wrt performance, I think Cargo is way faster than Semantic MediaWiki (both
a priori, because it uses fairly straightforward SQL while SMW has layers
of database abstraction, and from what I heard about the few large
Gamepedia wikis which used one or the other). Comparison with DPL doesn't
really make sense as they do very different things. In any case, worrying
about that level of scaling on a wiki with a hundred or so pages would be a
particularly bad case of premature optimization. Performance might become a
bottleneck as WMCS servers aren't too large, but how two extensions'
performance compares on a tiny wiki vs. on a huge wiki are mostly unrelated
questions; and I don't think there's anything in Cargo that should be a
priori concerning. In any case, there isn't really any other option - SMW
is probably worse along almost all dimensions (other than flexibility and
support for semantic technologies, and there doesn't seem any user demand
for those at the moment), Wikidata requires a shared database to work, and
a custom Wikibase is way beyond our capacity to set up and probably a lot
more complicated to use.
Wrt security, my admittedly superficial impression is that Cargo is
somewhat risky but much less risky than it used to be, and I'd like
Wikispore to be a place where experimentation/risk tradeoffs are acceptable
and mitigated by not storing much personal data. (I wrote about my
technical vision here
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Tgr_(WMF)/Sister_project_incubator>.)
With OAuth and Wikimedia Cloud's IP filtering I think we have mostly
achieved that, although admittedly we still need to do something about
email addresses (that's T262781 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T262781>
).