I felt I should respond to this...
I run about a dozen MediaWiki wikis singlehandedly. I've been using
MediaWiki since 2005, and I think only once did I run into a substantial
problem doing an upgrade. Upgrading has only gotten easier over the
years, too... and I use a lot of extensions, including some I've
customized or written from scratch.
Mind you, I generally only do upgrades when either (a) migrating a site
to a new server, (b) I want to install an extension not supported by the
current version, or (c) I want new features -- but this is only because
the process takes a fair amount of time, not because it is especially
difficult. I could probably write up a guide to safe MediaWiki upgrading
in a printed page or so.
There is some truth to what Ryan says, but the impression he left on me
-- that maintaining MediaWiki is a hopeless mess for most admins -- is
rather at odds with my own experience.
(Side note, with regard to preserving old MediaWiki content when
maintenance becomes too much of a chore: Dkosopedia has apparently
abandoned MediaWiki; their content is now static HTML. I'd be interested
in finding out both why and how they did this.)
Woozle
On 01/19/2015 07:01 AM, wikitech-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
What you're forgetting is that WMF abandoned MediaWiki as an Open
Source project quite a while ago (at least 2 years ago). There's a
separate org that gets a grant from WMF to handle third party use, and
it's funded just well enough to keep the lights on. Take a look at the
current state of MediaWiki on the internet. I'd be surprised if less
than 99% of the MediaWiki wikis in existence are out of date. Most are
probably running a version from years ago. The level of effort
required to upgrade MediaWiki and its extensions that don't list
compatibility with core versions is past the skill level of most
people that use the software. Even places with a dedicated ops team
find MediaWiki difficult to keep up to date. Hell, I find it difficult
and I worked for WMF on the ops team and have been a MediaWiki dev
since 1.3. I don't think adding a couple more services is going to
drastically alter the current situation. - Ryan
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