Tim Starling wrote: >Note that feature parity with Wikipedia has not been possible in pure >PHP since 2003, when texvc was introduced. And now that we have >Scribunto, you can't even copy an infobox template from Wikipedia to a >pure-PHP hosted MediaWiki instance. The shared hosting environment has >never been preferred, and I'm not particularly attached to it. Support >for it is an accidental consequence of MediaWiki's simplicity and >flexibility, and those qualities should be valued for their own reasons.
I tripped across <http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Main_Page> recently. This is one of many specialized wikis throughout the Internet. I don't know if Glottopedia is using shared hosting or not, but the larger point is that small ideas can turn into big ideas. You've been quite fond of referencing the Wikimedia Foundation's vision statement lately. I think you probably recognize that Wikimedia wikis can't house everything; they can house much, much more than they currently do, but some information will be too specialized or esoteric for an encyclopedia or a source repository or a quote collection or whatever. And so you have the actual "rest of the library" to build and maintain (as opposed to what Wikia has wrought), some of which is built upon small MediaWiki installations, which may or may not turn into large MediaWiki installations one day. There are a lot of decisions that MediaWiki development could have made to make shared hosting support difficult or nearly impossible. .php5 file suffixes, the ability to re-run the installer as an upgrade path, retaining support for older versions of PHP, etc. We've added or supported functionality in order to serve users who, for example, may or may not have shell access or who may or may not have strong technical capabilities. I completely agree with supporting simplicity and flexibility and I agree that complete feature parity hasn't been possible in quite some time. It's in thinking about users who are on more limited hosts that we often develop better (simpler and more flexible) solutions. I strongly disagree with the seeming dismissal of smaller sites that have more limited budgets who have already chosen to use MediaWiki. We should be proud of how popular MediaWiki has become across the Internet and we should support its growth because it ultimately supports our own. The more people engaged with and using MediaWiki, the better off we are. While you may not be attached to these smaller installations, the people who work on them are and I don't think it's fair to these users, MediaWiki's customers and supporters, to casually wave them aside as flukes. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
