MediaWiki
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MediaWiki is the open source wiki engine that drives all of the Wikimedia projects. It's written in PHP.
Current State of MediaWiki
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The MediaWiki platform has been a key to Wikimedia's success, enabling Wikimedia projects to become a top five web site.
MediaWiki is the most popular and successful wiki engine.{{citation needed}} It's also used by Wikia, wikiHow, and internally in many companies (such as Intel)
MediaWiki has some weaknesses:
| MediaWiki platform has been key to Wikimedia’s success… | *Software supports mass collaboration enabling Wikipedia to become a top five website * Popular and successful wiki software program |
| …but software has key weaknesses . . . | * Lack of policies and support has led to inconsistent and poorly written code that does not effectively support current Internet trends *MediaWiki has limited documentation |
| …which inhibit further development and future potential of software | * Efficiency of efforts to improve and add new functionalities to MediaWiki is inhibited by inconsistent and poor code * Difficult to work with volunteer developers to improve the core platform |
- As with most open source software projects, some of the code contributions are inconsistent and poorly written.
- Coding standards are now documented (mostly) at mw:Manual:Coding conventions. Forcing compliance is a bit harder.
- MediaWiki's documentation is limited. The lack of documentation makes it difficult to leverage volunteer developers.
- Code documentation is improving, auto-generated at [1]. MediaWiki.org needs a focused cleanup effort
- Efficiency of efforts to improve and add new functionality to MediaWiki is inhibited by inconsistent and poor code.
The core user interface has major limitations. See usability for a longer discussion of these issues.
Ongoing development of Wikimedia's software platform has been slowed by gaps in capacity:
| Leadership Gap | * Foundation currently lacks a CTO to oversee technical staff and set direction for the project |
| Limited number of paid staff | * WMF has 5 core developers plus 5-6 FTEs working on a 1 year usability grant, significantly less than organizations with smaller audiences and contributor bases:
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| Under-utilized volunteer developers | * Insufficient paid staff to review volunteer code * Insufficient resources and poor process to identify promising extensions and widgets developed by volunteers and make them accessible to casual users * Don’t effectively attract and retain new volunteer developers |