The Wikipedia stack

FOSDEM 2014

Let's explore the fully open source technology stack of Wikipedia and Wikimedia's other projects, and the many ways to get involved in making the sum of all knowledge available to every person on the planet.

Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects serve more than 500 million users every month. That's about 20B pageviews/month (4B on mobile). The Wikimedia Foundation does all its work as open source development. From being entirely volunteer-driven, it has grown to employ a staff of 100+ in engineering, analytics, design & product development. What do these folks do? In this session we'll talk about:

templates, Lua scripting, and the promises and challenges of visually editing Wikipedia on desktop and mobile clients;
task recommendation and onboarding for new users, and how to build a modern discussion/collaboration engine that won't turn Wikipedia into Facebook;
Wikimedia Labs, the MediaWiki API, OAuth, MediaWiki extensions, user scripts and gadgets - the many ways to be part of the development and operations community.

Speakers: Erik Moeller