[Engineering] [Ops] The train will resume tomorrow (was Re: All wikis reverted to wmf.8 last night due to T119736)

Wed Jul 13 19:01:27 UTC 2016

On 13/07/16 20:17, Anna Stillwell wrote:
> Thank you for your perspective, Matt. I do believe that you always take
> your work seriously. :)
>
> Giuseppe, your point about a dedicated Media Wiki team is central. I've
> talked to many in Tech about this. I wonder if that point should be made
> in the incident report. Given the absence of a hired CTO to drive
> decisions like this... is there anyone besides Wes on senior leadership
> that needs to understand potential impacts (such as this one and many
> others)?

[Excluded ops / wikitech lists, I am not subscribed with this mail]

Hello Anna,

MediaWiki started as a software solely for Wikimedia usage and then 
quickly expanded to be used by third parties. We had a "mediawiki core 
team" leaded by Rob Lanphier which eventually ended up managing a lot 
more, up to a point that MediaWiki was no more the main occupation.

When that team got disbanded, I am pretty sure as a member of that team, 
that we all have been very happy to focus instead of trying to fire 
fight everything.

Usage of MediaWiki by others is barely supported, well it is a best 
effort but it is far from what we could eventually achieve.

Supporting MediaWiki has been a recurring topic for as long as I can 
remember.  It is never endorsed by WMF as a standalone software nor 
actively maintained by non WMF people.  We also have hired every single 
good developers of MediaWiki leaving little place for other organizations.

Anyway Brion Vibber had the idea to set a Mediawiki focused team and it 
has been discussed in January 2016 during the dev summit.  There is some 
material on mediawiki.org which you might want to read:

A goal proposal for Engineering group:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2016-17_Goals/New_MediaWiki-focused_team

Fully detailled proposal:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2016-17_Goals/New_MediaWiki-focused_team/Platform_proposal

If you think it has the merit to be pushed forward, I would recommend to 
reach out to Rob Lanphier and Brion Vibber.  They both have the context 
and history and are most probably eager to have the issue solved.

Another thing you might encounter is the concept of MediaWiki 
Foundation.  Literally spinning up a stand-alone tech oriented 
foundation that would solely take care of MediaWiki, not necessarily 
strictly for WMF needs.  Some (including me) even suggested to make that 
entity a for profit company that would provide consulting services.

If one solve that. I guess you will get a lot of barnstars.

-- 
Antoine Musso