User:Svippong/WikiFarmingRevolutionProposal

Introduction
Wiki farming in MediaWiki is perhaps the least developed/polished feature I can think of. The reason probably been lack of motivation, since WMF works pretty good and Wikia seems to be nicely as well. But why do they do nicely when smaller wiki farms often hit walls? Because they either have specialised hacks or code focused on their setups entirely.

Indeed, the article on wiki families have several solutions. But nothing concrete, nothing perfect, nothing fully supported.

The current usage of $wgConf seems only to work on WMF and the --wiki switch on maintenance scripts does not work elsewhere than WMF either, making it impossible to update 'other wikis' with the update.php script.

Definition
A wiki farm is hosted on a single MediaWiki installation, in comparison to a wiki family which is many installations connected by interlinks. This proposal will be about the former.

$wgWikiFarm
First of all, introduce a new global variable called $wgWikiFarm, which is per default is contentless. And if not set, MediaWiki behave as normal. But this simple function allows for create all the basics you need.