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by shimst3r 2314 days ago
> Parsoid/PHP also brings us one step closer to integrating Parsoid and other MediaWiki wikitext-handling code into a single system, which will be easier to maintain and extend.

I assume that Wikimedia works on a rather tight budget. Choosing (and unifying on) tech stacks with a larger supply in devs seems to be an economically reasonable choice.
4 comments
onei 2314 days ago
It's more complicated than that. MediaWiki is PHP based because back when it was developed PHP was everywhere. Since then the world has moved on, but PHP still powers a huge percentage of the web via things like WordPress.

The other side to using PHP was having support in other host providers. Wikipedia is not the only installation of MediaWiki and there has been consideration in the past for those installing MediaWiki on shared hosts where you don't necessarily have root access to install things like node. Moving forward that's less of a concern because you can containerise MediaWiki (and the other services), but not even Wikimedia run that in production yet AFAIK.

However, even if they weren't budget constrained (which they aren't) unifying on a single language used by the majority of their devs isn't a bad idea, especially when the effort to port the entire stack to a new language would be unjustifiable.

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lowercased 2314 days ago
and... migrating an entire codebase to something new because there's a subset of devs that jump between tech stacks and want 'newer' stuff isn't an economically reasonable choice.

server-side JS was a thing 10 years ago, but it didn't offer enough benefits to switch. same with python, java, ruby - all existed, but didn't offer enough benefits to switch then, and probably still don't now.

also, what would be a "larger supply"? C? Java? C#? JS? PHP has a huge supply of developers at all skill levels, which may make it just as easy (or easier) in finding the talent they need. And... hey - they wrote that initial parsoid in JS and... they've doubled the speed by converging on PHP.

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maxfromua 2314 days ago
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
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krick 2314 days ago
Huh. What ED of Wikimedia Foundation even does?
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thomasz 2314 days ago
Wikimedia is swimming in donations. More than $100,000,000 yearly since 2017/2018.
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