Core Platform Team/Initiatives/Article

Article Product Owner: Daniel Kinzler Technical Contact: Status: Planning Initiative Vision: Read Edit Initiative Description: Epics, User Stories, and Requirements: Time and Resource Estimates: Open Questions: Documentation Links:

Initiative Vision

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Vision: Page "types" become a well defined and extensioble concept in MediaWiki Boundaries between the responsibilities of WikiPage, Article, and Action are cleaned up Extensions can easily define new page types.
Stakeholder(s): MediaWiki developers (core and extensions) will benefit from clearer, more testable code Extension developers (in WMF and elsewhere) will have more control over the behavior of pages their extension manages. Quality + test engineering may be interested since we are making code more testable by removing special cases throughout the code base	Problem: Special behavior for each kind of page (e.g. articles, file pages, categories, talk pages, user scripts, etc) is hard coded in various places across the code base. WikiPage acts as a root of a class hierarchy that mirrors the one rooted in Article The Article base class is huge, implementing behavior for several different UI actions Extensions cannot easily define new kinds of pages. They have to use hooks to modify the behavior of existing kinds of pages.		Solution: Define special behavior for each kind of page (e.g. articles, file pages, categories, talk pages, user scripts, etc) in subclasses of Article. Remove the WikiPage hierarchy Extract action handling code from Article into Action classes. Create a registry system for page types, allowing extensions to register their own.	Aligned Goals: Improve code quality by reducing coupling Improve code health by improving testability Improve maintainability by modeling domain concepts clearly	Success Metrics:

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