[Foundation-l] MediaWiki 1.7.1 and Wikipedia

Mon Jul 10 19:43:18 UTC 2006

I realize that mediawiki-l is a good list for reporting bugs in 
mediawiki, however, this posting addresses organizational elements of 
the 1.7 release
that I feel need to be taken seriously by the Wikimedia Foundation and 
some changes made in your processes.   The statements that follow are
the result of my 20+ years experience as a 1) CEO of high tech companies 
2) Chief Scientist of high tech companies 3) Wikipedia developer
 4) Wikigadugi Language Project leader.  Wikimedia can take or leave the 
comments -- they are for your benefit and consideration.

<WP:SOAP>

1.  Great that MediaWiki 1.7.1 is released.
2.  Has Dependencies on PHP 5.0.0 (5.1.4).  php 5 is a bug infested 
experimental release which does not have consistent installs on the 
commerical
Linux distributions, including Red Hat ES 4, Suse 10, etc, crashes on 
apache, is poorly documented, and has a slew of defects, is difficult to 
install and configure. 
3.  Wikitext and MediaWiki has no dependencies for "wikitext" markup on 
php versions, so requiring php upgrades is unnecessary and thoughtless,
and should be stopped.  When you allow the developers of a technology to 
operate in a vacuum without accountability to customers and end users,
the projects get driven by the community ego and not end goals to 
promote the technology to the public. 
4.  The biggest failure of community driven programs and open source is 
a lack of accountablity to end users and customers. 

What should happen in the future:

1.  MediaWiki needs to post releases against commercial Linux distros 
and not a "roll your own" with a patchwork of patches and fixes.  As it 
stands,
MediaWiki 1.7.1 is not installable or usable on RedHat ES4 or FC5 
without major patching and recompiling -- steps outside the skills of 
most folks
who need to use Wikipedia content. 
2.  Wikimedia needs to enforce MediaWiki releases to allow seamless 
importing and use of XML dumps and content.

My 2 cents.

I spend currently about 40% of my time getting around MediaWiki problems 
with Wikipedia XML dumps, and 60% of my time actually working on Native 
language translations.  The Uto-Aztecan language is being added at 
present as the Ute and Unita tribes have joined the WikiGadugi project.  
It would be nice if the MediaWiki folks would give more thought to 
ensuring their software works properly before posting releases, and the 
Wikimedia Foundation needs to enforce compatibilty between its published 
XML dumps and make certain they work properly with released MediaWiki 
versions.  As it stands, the current setup almost appears 
anti-competitive by design to prevent folks from creating Wiki's of 
Wikipedia content (though I do not believe this is intentional on the 
part of Wikimedia).   

The "we are community driven" excuse only works if the community is also 
the customer and end consumer of Wikipedia content, which it is not.  
Anything we can do to make all of our jobs easier and more pleasant is 
appreciated.

</WP:SOAP>

Jeff