[Foundation-l] MediaWiki 1.7.1 and Wikipedia

Tue Jul 11 02:30:33 UTC 2006

Brion Vibber wrote:
> Delirium wrote:
>   
>> While I know there are plenty of logistical issues involved, I think 
>> from the point of view of the Foundation's charitable mission this is 
>> somewhat of a problem, because the point of producing Wikipedia is not 
>> just to put up an encyclopedia at *.wikipedia.org, but to produce 
>> encyclopedia articles that are Free and reusable by anyone.  If the 
>> articles we distribute are only fully renderable by unreleased software 
>> or software that's particularly complex to set up and configure, that 
>> discourages third-party reuse.
>>     
>
> And if that were true, I might agree.
>
> But PHP 5 is neither unreleased nor particularly complex to set up. It's been in
> production for years, is widely available on thousands of free and for-pay
> hosting services, and can be installed on any home computer or server in a
> manner of minutes using any number of package installers.
>   

I was speaking of the use of unreleased versions of MediaWiki and 
complex/undocumented extension setups (which extensions *are* enabled on 
Wikipedia anyway?  I know LaTeX and Cite are; is that all?).  PHP 5 is 
fine of course.

-Mark