MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group/Blog/2017-06-12

MediaWiki Stakeholders' June News Roundup

Author: Chris Koerner

People: Karsten Hoffmeyer, Cindy Cicalese, Yaron Koren, Markus Glaser, Sabine Melnicki, Victoria Coleman

Tags: News, Event, Mediawiki Release, Request for Comments

It's been a few months since we last had a MediaWiki Stakeholders' news roundup. In no particular order are a few items that MediaWiki folks might find interesting.

• Extension compatibility policy can now be declared in infobox - please update! - If you have an extension on MediaWiki.org you can now add what your compatibility policy is. Tgr also added new fields for "maintainer" and "services" if those apply.

• At EMWCon Spring 2017 Victoria Coleman asked "how the third-party MediaWiki community benefits the Wikimedia Foundation and what support that community would like from the Foundation". After the event Stakeholders' members came together to send Victoria a response. That response is now public on MediaWiki.org (malling list announcement)

• Increase MediaWiki minimum supported MySQL version to 5.5 What it says on the tin. Should the minimum supported version of MySQL be 5.5? MediaWiki users are encouraged to join the conversation.

• Introducing the MediaWiki Platform Team! Yep, that's right. The Wikimedia Foundation is forming a team dedicated to, "leading maintenance and improvements related to the core MediaWiki platform codebase. That includes encouraging future development of the MediaWiki platform and addressing the technical debt that has accumulated during the 15-year history of MediaWiki.". I'm a little biased, but I think this is encouraging news for the MediaWiki community.

• Improvements to developer events in the WMF Annual Plan draft Some potential changes to the dev summit to make it "more strategic and influential function for the movement".

• Arch Comm evolution plan needs your feedback - The WMF Architecture Committee (ArchComm) is changing to the Wikimedia Technical Committee. This change brings about a change is mandate and scope of the committee. Review of the charter and general feedback is welcome.

• The MediaWiki Stakeholders' track at the recent Vienna hackathon was well received. Our own Sabine Melnicki and Markus Glaser wrote about their experiences at the event.

• Speaking of the hackathon, there were many great projects in the showcase. Take a look to see what sorts of things people are working on in, and around, the MediaWiki world. (Video recording)

• SMWCon Fall 2017 Announcement Another Fall, another SMWCon! The is s the 14th Semantic MediaWiki Conference, this time in Rotterdam, The Netherlands October 4-6.

• Karsten is scratching his head over a change in the default search behavior in MediaWiki after upgrading from 1.23 to 1.27. Anyone with similar issues is welcome to help figure out what's going on.

• 1.29.0-rc.0 released, timeline on 1.29.0, EOL of 1.23.x - More procedural work to move MediaWiki forward. Take a look at the notes, help test the RC, and bug your admin to update. :)

• RFC call for comments on Reading List Service - The Readers department at the Wikimedia Foundation is looking to create a Reading List Service. This would allow folks to create a list of articles to bookmark. The discussion is around what would this service look like and how can it be used by folks. Comments welcome.

• Announcing: the Enterprise MediaWiki Consortium Yaron Koren's membership-driven initiative to create a fund to further the development of extensions and other software for MediaWiki sites.