Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/MediaWiki's future

MediaWiki's future

MediaWiki, the software that powers the Wikimedia movement sites, is a remarkable piece of engineering. Not only does it support the very specific use cases of the various projects (Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource, etc), but it is also used by many other individuals and organizations spanning the entire range of institutional size, from the biggest multinational firm to the smallest boutique site. Those third-parties (users outside Wikimedia) are an important part of the MediaWiki ecosystem, as they provide added testing and development time to the project.

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce that we have contracted with two long-time members of the MediaWiki community--Mark Hershberger and Markus Glaser--to manage and drive forward the third-party focused releases of MediaWiki.

Over a month ago, the Wikimedia Foundation sent out a request for proposals (RFP) to help us fill an important and underserved role in the development of MediaWiki. Two very solid proposals were produced, the community weighed in with questions and comments, and there was an open IRC office hour with the authors and interested community members. The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased with the outcome of this RFP and excited to begin this new chapter in the life of MediaWiki.

Mark and Markus bring a wealth of knowledge to this endeavor as they are both MediaWiki contractors helping others set up, use, and do unique customizations of MediaWiki on a daily basis. They certainly know what third-party users of MediaWiki want.

As Mark Hershberger relates,

We are excited to work with the Foundation to enable the community of developers to respond in a more agile way to third-party MediaWiki users. Together, we will develop the next generation of MediaWiki software and build strategic and lasting relationships with Open Source organizations and third-party wikis.

Mark and Markus will be working a few things, especially leading the efforts to make new tarball releases of the software, improve the continuous integration infrastructure, shepherd through changes to extension maintenance, and collaborate with others adding documentation for third-party users. All of their progress will be documented on the MediaWiki wiki for others to follow along and help.

Please join me in congratulating Mark and Marcus. We're very excited to see what they will accomplish!

Greg Grossmeier

Release Manager, Wikimedia Foundation