Schools of thought concerning integration of extensions into the core

An extension should be bundled with the installer after it has become extremely widely used. There are a couple major schools of thought concerning other extensions. The wikidynamist view is that it is better to let the different extensions compete for acceptance on an even playing field unless and until the wikisphere settles on a clear favorite, the idea being that such a decentralized process harnesses the knowledge and creativity of a larger group to create solutions, and incorporates useful feedback about their preferences into the standard-setting process. The wikitechnocratic view is that it is better for the developer community to play a leadership role of picking what everyone should use rather than waiting for system administrators across the wikisphere to reach consensus; this helps progress by facilitating the emergence of widely-used standards, thus avoiding unnecessary delays or inconvenient.

A major issue is whether adopting one standard will interfere with another. For example, adding a new special page or API module is unlikely to interfere with other desired functionalities. Changing how the parser renders wikitext might be a different matter. Then again, if such parser features were to be adopted by major WMF wikis such as Wikipedia, it would likely be adopted widely across the wikisphere since wikis would want to be able to have pages imported from Wikipedia render properly. So, some centralized standard-setting may be unavoidable. Perhaps a good rule of thumb is that if wikis will need the extension (e.g. Extension:ParserFunctions or Extension:Cite) in order to properly render pages imported from Wikipedia, then the extension might as well be bundled with the installer or integrated into the core, because almost everyone is going to end up installing it on their wikis anyway.

When deciding whether to integrate an extension into the core, one should consider the likelihood, if any, that extensions will be written that depend upon that functionality, and the prospects that it might be later desired to remove that functionality from the core, which would break those extensions. Extensions with uncommon external dependencies should generally not be bundled with the installer or integrated into the core.