MediaWiki architecture document/status

Last update on: 2012-01-31

2011-08-31
Greg Wilson, editor of the Architecture of Open Source Applications book, contacted the engineering department of the Wikimedia Foundation to offer to include a chapter on MediaWiki in volume 2 of the book, which presents the architecture of large-scale open-source projects, and decisions that led to it. Since it appeared that a document would also be generally useful to help new developers dive into MediaWiki development, Guillaume Paumier and Sumana Harihareswara accepted the responsibility of leading the collaborative writing of the document by the MediaWiki community.

2011-09-30
A handful of developers contributed to the project. Sumana Harihareswara reached out to developers to convince them to participate, while Guillaume Paumier continued to go through historical content to document the evolution of MediaWiki's architecture.

2011-10-31
Guillaume Paumier finished the write-up of the document, based on the input provided by developers, the existing documentation on mediawiki.org, the auto-generated documentation from doxygen, and deep dives into the actual code. The MediaWiki community reviewed the document, which was submitted to the book's editors. This project is considered to be mostly completed. Further work will include minor polishing and follow-up on the document and its publication, and integration of the content into the relevant pages on mediawiki.org.

2011-11-30
The Architecture of Open Source Applications book editors reviewed the first revision of the document and provided feedback. Guillaume Paumier addressed their comments, with the help of Sumana Harihareswara, who reached out to developers to research additional details. A second revision of the document was submitted to the editors, who sent it to technical reviewers for another review. The content of the second revision was integrated to the MediaWiki history and Manual:MediaWiki architecture pages.

2011-12-31
This project was mostly on hold in December, while the book's technical reviewers went through the content. They provided a second round of feedback and minor recommendations, that will be addressed in January.

2012-01-31
This project is now completed; Guillaume Paumier did some final polishing of the text in collaboration with the book editors. We expect the Architecture of Open Source Applications book to come out in March 2012.