The current convention and best practice in PHP and many other web-focused languages is to use semantic versioning (semver) where the version number looks like <major>.<minor>.<patch>, where a breaking change always involves increasing the major version number (and minor means new functionality while patch means no new functionality, although that distinction tends to be more fuzzy in practice). MediaWiki's version numbers look like 1.<major>.<minor/patch>, with the 1 not really having any meaning. We could change that to <major>.0.<minor/patch> and be close enough to semver for most practical purposes (I don't think there is much value in trying to differentiate between minor and patch, not much new functionality is added between new major releases anyway).

Ie. instead of MediaWiki 1.41.0, the next release would be 41.0.0.