[Foundation-l] Question about Mediawiki versions on Wikipedia

Thu Jul 6 17:39:46 UTC 2006

On 7/6/06, Jeff V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
> I noticed that Mediawiki 1.6.7. has some issues with current content
> with Infoboxes and Cite.php references when citing books and websites.
> I also read that 1.7 is what's running on Wikipedia.  Is there a good
> reason why XML dumps are kept broken and Wikipedia is always using
> unreleased versions as opposed to the other way around.  Most folks run
> production websites on a stable release and leave the experimental
> releases for developers -- here this is reversed.
>
> It's a little frustrating to run down continual problems with the dumps.
>
> Any enlightenment would be appreciated.

Who says Wikipedia is production? :)
Like the content the software is a work in progress. Hopefully it will
all be more stable in the future, until then translators will also
have to suffer along with our growing pains.

You can check out the version of Mediawiki that we use from SVN
(http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download_from_SVN), so it's not
unreleased it's just not the version we are recommending to third
parties. (After all, most Mediawiki sites outside of Wikipedia don't
care about tracking wikipedia's features very closely).