Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

This is so true.

I adopted mediawiki to run a knowledge base for my organization at Microsoft ( https://microsoft.github.io/code-with-engineering-playbook/I... ).

As I was exploring self-host options that would scale to our org size, it turned out there was already an internal team running a company wide multi-tenant mediawiki PLATFORM.

So I hit them up and a week later we had a custom instance and were off to the races.

Almost all the work that team did was making mediawiki hyper efficient with caching and cache gen, along with a lot of plumbing to have shared infra (AD auth, semitrusted code repos, etc) thst still allowed all of us “customers” to implement whatever whacky extensions and templates we needed.

I still hope that one day Microsoft will acknowledge that they use Mediawiki internally (and to great effect) and open-source the whole stack, or at least offer it as a hosted platform.

I tried setting up a production instance af my next employer - and we ended up using confluence , it was like going back to the dark ages. But I couldn’t make any reasonable financial argument against it - it would have taken a a huge lift to get a vanilla MW instance integrated into the enterprise IT environment.



Microsoft did open source a bunch of their mediawiki extensions. https://github.com/microsoft/mediawiki-extensions

Last i heard though they were moving off it.


Nice!! Made my day. Not sure how they can move off of it, partly because there’s no alternative that has a fraction of the capability


The rumour i heard is they were making their own custom thing.

There was some rumours that they were unhappy about mediawiki's response to patches they submitted (they made a bunch around accessibility). However i looked through their patches at one point when this rumour started flying around and it looked like most were merged. Those that weren't generally had code review comments with questions or pointing out mistakes which were never replied to. I sort of suspect the patch thing was some sort of internal excuse because the team involved wanted to make their own thing.

Regardless, im really happy they decided to open source their extensions and it was nice to see that they put in effort to upstream core patches.


Yeah the team running the platform internally was amazing to work with and did incredible work with just a handful of resources.

The efficiency for scale of mediawiki is hard to beat.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: