On 25 January 2016 at 20:16, Rob Lanphier <[email protected]> wrote:
> So: forks welcome! Any takers? At this point I'm not sure any non-Wikimedia MediaWiki contributors have the resources to do so. I think WMF employs most of the main MW developers, and probably does >50% of the development. On 25 January 2016 at 20:16, Rob Lanphier <[email protected]> wrote: > The reason why I'm delineating it as a subgroup is not a power grab, but an > essential step toward building the trust required for long term viability > of a MediaWiki(?) Foundation to be viable. The fact that the people > working on the "MediaWiki Foundation" are still(!) using the name > "MediaWiki" represents a failure of imagination among all of us. On 25 January 2016 at 20:16, Rob Lanphier <[email protected]> wrote: > Yes, I used the word "fork". I believe Wikimedia Foundation would love it > if MediaWiki forked, and we were "forced" to switch to the fork. As it stands, Wikimedia Foundation is the only trusted upstream for the MediaWiki codebase. I believe WMF should jealously guard the "MediaWiki" trademark, if for no other reason than to force someone to come up with a different name. "MediaWiki" and "Wikimedia" are too similar, and there are not good reasons for us to license that trademark to anyone else. WMF doesn't have a patent on the alphabet; come up with your own damn name ;-) So Wikimedia would keep the MediaWiki trademark and no longer have to worry about supporting 'third parties', and presumably most of the MW code actively being developed by Wikimedia would no longer be expected to run outside of WMF production/beta cluster/developer's laptops? I assume you'd merge MediaWiki.org into wikitech.wikimedia.org and copy the non-Wikimedia-specific stuff to be imported into a new (non-WMF-hosted) wiki for the fork, controlled by the maintainers of the fork. I'm picturing a situation whereby a (probably unlikely to be successful) fork is made, MediaWiki core (now entirely a Wikimedia thing) is changed to depend on various things such as external services (probably with various WMF-specific requirements/expectations), the fork never really takes off, and we're left with MediaWiki that no longer supports anyone but Wikimedia. That seems like quite a risk. I like the idea of MediaWiki being a proper independent upstream, not just a fork that's set up to get 'third parties' out of the largest MW contributor's hair and then left to diverge significantly (to the point where WMF couldn't simply migrate on the normal deployment branching schedule) and/or die. On 25 January 2016 at 20:16, Rob Lanphier <[email protected]> wrote: > If we should be pressuring anyone > to make non-Wikimedia use of MediaWiki viable, it shouldn't be WMF, someone > from Wikia should step up. :-P > I'm not sure anyone is pressuring WMF into putting resources into developing new things only 'third parties' need. Non-Wikimedia use of MediaWiki is already viable, and just like all other contributors, Wikimedia is expected to keep MW core reasonably generic enough such that it can be used by others, which seems to cause certain people within Wikimedia to want to get rid of everyone else so they can do their own thing. Didn't Wikia fork long ago? _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
