User:DKinzler (WMF)/Sandbox

Wikipedia is one of the top ten websites in the world, currently getting about 400 million unique visitors a month. It gets over 100,000 hits per second. Wikipedia isn't commercially supported by ads; it is entirely supported by a non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, which relies on donations as its primary funding model. This means that MediaWiki must not only run a top-ten website, but also do so on a shoestring budget. To meet these demands, MediaWiki has a heavy bias towards performance, caching and optimization. Expensive features that can't be enabled on Wikipedia are either reverted or disabled through a configuration variable; there is an endless balance between performance and features.

The influence of Wikipedia on MediaWiki's architecture isn't limited to performance. Unlike generic CMSes, MediaWiki was originally written for a very specific purpose: supporting a community that creates and curates freely-reusable knowledge on an open platform. This means, for example, that MediaWiki doesn't include regular features found in corporate CMSes (like easy publication workflow or ACLs), but does offer a variety of tools to handle spam and vandalism.

So, from the start, the needs and actions of a constantly evolving community of Wikipedia participants have affected MediaWiki's development, and vice versa. The architecture of MediaWiki has been driven many times by initiatives started or requested by the community, such as the creation of Wikimedia Commons, or the Flagged Revisions feature. Developers made major architectural changes, like MediaWiki 1.12's preprocessor, because the way that MediaWiki was used by Wikipedians made it necessary.

MediaWiki has also gained a solid external user base by being open-source software from the beginning. Third-party reusers know that as long as such a high-profile website as Wikipedia uses MediaWiki, the software will be maintained and improved. MediaWiki used to be really focused on Wikimedia sites, but efforts have been made to make it more generic and better accommodate the needs of these third-party users. For example, MediaWiki ships with an excellent web-based installer, making the installation process much less painful than when everything had to be done via the command line, and the software contained hardcoded paths for Wikipedia.

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The influence of Wikipedia on MediaWiki's architecture isn't limited to performance. Unlike generic CMSes, MediaWiki was originally written for a very specific purpose: supporting a community that creates and curates freely-reusable knowledge on an open platform. This means, for example, that MediaWiki doesn't include regular features found in corporate CMSes (like easy publication workflow or ACLs), but does offer a variety of tools to handle spam and vandalism.

So, from the start, the needs and actions of a constantly evolving community of Wikipedia participants have affected MediaWiki's development, and vice versa. The architecture of MediaWiki has been driven many times by initiatives started or requested by the community, such as the creation of Wikimedia Commons, or the Flagged Revisions feature. Developers made major architectural changes, like MediaWiki 1.12's preprocessor, because the way that MediaWiki was used by Wikipedians made it necessary.

MediaWiki has also gained a solid external user base by being open-source software from the beginning. Third-party reusers know that as long as such a high-profile website as Wikipedia uses MediaWiki, the software will be maintained and improved. MediaWiki used to be really focused on Wikimedia sites, but efforts have been made to make it more generic and better accommodate the needs of these third-party users. For example, MediaWiki ships with an excellent web-based installer, making the installation process much less painful than when everything had to be done via the command line, and the software contained hardcoded paths for Wikipedia.