User:Daniel Kinzler (WMDE)/WMDS 2018 Position Statement

I would like to discuss how assumptions drive our day to day work, and how to may sure we properly understand and regularly challenge these assumptions. I'm particularly interested in how technological assumptions shape product decisions, and how product assumptions shape technological decisions. Three major axioms come to mind:

MediaWiki needs to run in a shared hosting environment. This has been an explicit requirement for a long time now, but the baseline product that actually does run in such an environment (LAMP with no root access) is becoming more and more sub-par. We are already struggling to provide a decent mobile browsing experience there, not to mention search or WYSIWYG editing. So we should have a discussion about for how long we want to kep this requirement, what the consequences would be of dropping it, and what alternative platform we should target for the baseline installation of MediaWiki.

Editing has to work with old browsers and without JavaScript. It has long been an explicit requirement that no basic functionality, particularly editing, can require JavaScript to be enabled. However, this causes us to fall behind other sites further and further. With more and more sites requiring JS, it's becoming less and less clear to me that this requirement is still sensible. This is especially true in the light of many developing countries skipping straight from mostly-offline to mobile-only.

The primary medium for knowledge sharing is text. This assumption used to be hard-coded into MediaWiki until the introduction of ContentHandler, and it still seems to be hard coded in the minds of many long term contributors, to the software and to the wikis. I believe that it is high time to invest into exploring other media formats and alternative forms of collaboration. It seems to me like "Beyond Wikitext" is the major technological challenge that has come out of the movement strategy process, and that we should start thinking and talking about it - from the technological side as well as the product side.