Thread:Talk:Release Management RFP/NicheWork and Hallo Welt!/Release Management and Visual Editor/reply (3)

That sounds great, but if VisualEditor/Parsoid is only a shim while we wait for the great MediaWiki 2.0, it would be nice to support the users of the MediaWiki tarball itself while we wait for the transition to MW2.0.

Part of is a communication problem (which are what most problems on Open Source projects are). The idea of MW2.0 has been "in the air" but the MW tarball-using community doesn't have a clue what that would entail. And since the idea is only "in the air", there haven't been any focused discussions with third party users about their needs and uses.

Yes, developers would love HTML+RDFa -- it would give them a better toolset. Editors would like a more visual interface -- it would make working on the wiki easier. For those two needs, HTML+RDFa is wonderful.

But people have modified MediaWiki over and over again. That isn't anyone's fault but their own, of course. However, that means that people who patched 1.10 to their needs are still running it. So part of the work is engaging the community and figuring out how to get them too keep current.

It becomes harder to do that, of course, if they're relying on their hacks that are tied to wikitext and WMF suddenly creates MW2.0 with HTML+RDFa.

So, yeah, coming out and saying something that sounds like "The node.js dependency doesn't matter because we're going to be changing the page store" sounds much scarier than saying "Why don't we port Parsoid to PHP?"

(I understand that weren't saying that the node.js dependency doesn't matter, but I'm just telling you what it sounds like. This is probably a discussion that belongs somewhere else, though.)