MediaWiki architecture document

This project's goal is to write a comprehensive document about MediaWiki's architecture, and the decisions in its history that led to its current organization.

Rationale
In August 2011, Greg Wilson, editor of the Architecture of Open Source Applications book, contacted the engineering department of the Wikimedia Foundation to offer to include a 5000-word chapter on MediaWiki in volume 2 of the book.

The Architecture of Open Source Applications book presents case studies of the architecture of large-scale open-source projects; the content is freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

It rapidly appeared that a document would also be generally useful to help new developers dive into MediaWiki development. For this reason, Guillaume Paumier and Sumana Harihareswara accepted the responsibility of leading the collaborative writing of the document by the MediaWiki community.

Timeline

 * September 9th: Project plan and schedule
 * Sept. 9th to Sept. 30th: outreach to the MediaWiki community; specific outreach to identified experts (e.g. Tim, Brion, Magnus, Lee); collection of input, historical knowledge & opinions
 * Oct. 1st to October 15th: integration of input, writing, polishing
 * October 15th, 2011: Delivery of the first draft
 * October 31st, 2011: Delivery of the final document
 * November: merge of the content into the appropriate pages on mediawiki.org
 * February 2012: Publication

Documents

 * Initial ideas; mostly used by Sumana & Guillaume
 * Brainstorming / collection page; where people share their experience, knowledge and opinions. Use the button in the big orange box above to get the prefilled text
 * Actual text of the document; slowly being assembled from the collection of input & sources
 * Manual:MediaWiki architecture: currently outdated; should be the main page to benefit from this project, along with MediaWiki history
 * Project status updates