Thread:Talk:Release Management RFP/NicheWork and Hallo Welt!/Release Management and Visual Editor/reply (6)

Yes, they were the organisations I was thinking of, alongside corporate internal users of MediaWiki like my former employers (I'm well aware of their current MW statuses; remember that I work with Wikia every day on VisualEditor :-)).

You seem to be confused; I'm not proposing or particularly defending this course of action, merely mentioning it because it seemed like you were unaware of it in the nature of your comments. The architectural and future strategy decisions of MediaWiki are something in which I take a strong interest in a personal and professional capacity, but I am not part of any secret cabal that is making these decisions. Indeed, the biggest problem with MediaWiki's future I would highlight (as you did) is that there doesn't appear to be such a person or group, and decisions don't get made so much as stumbled into.

Providing a nicer horse is still a dead end in the world of the motor car. The fact that most people currently have horses doesn't mean that they will forever. "Dead end" does not mean "bad", it means "a shrinking user base", in this case.

Absolutely, and that's why I'd be keen to see the model of LTS continued in the future. :-)

… and if you're happy to run a NodeJS server in your mix, VisualEditor/Parsoid will likely support MW 1.x for a considerable period. However, if you want a PHP-only shop, I can't see WMF spending the quite large resources from donor funds to port Parsoid over from NodeJS to PHP, given that part of the point of Parsoid was to get away from PHP's slowness for a task of this sort. In that case, the choices would be to run MW in wikitext-less mode (so no need for Parsoid) or to try to get someone to port Parsoid to PHP or another language of your choice.

Hence my point - if not WMF, who will do this? We can't just tell people using MW 1.x that "it'll be all right" if we don't have a plan.