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Historic context: Provide insights for Codex onboarding on how Wikimedia UI libraries came together and where they are used currently
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Description

Goal

When listening to Guergana Tzatchkova's recent onboarding experience with Wikimedia UI libraries at WMDE, it became clear that there's a gap in our current documentation:

Her shared question was: “Even why are we using some things?”

That made me think, that all this knowledge about how UI libs came together is work experience, chit-chat or hearsay.
We should present a short section on Codex mw.org article about history of UI libs at Wikimedia!

I think that would make a lot of sense for new devs to have such section for quicker context. Similar to the history section in Vue.js

Event Timeline

I think that a history section should do the following things:

  • Link to the original Vue.js RFC: T241180: RFC: Adopt a modern JavaScript framework for use with MediaWiki
  • Mention that Codex is intended as the successor of OOUI (but we're not at feature parity yet)
  • Mention that initial decisions around Codex were decided at the Designer/Developer summit in 2021; DST is now carrying out those decisions
  • Remind folks that the project is open source and contribution is welcomed

We may also want to mention that Codex is inspired by WVUI and Wikit, but those libraries are now considered deprecated (and we hope to get all projects that use them onto Codex soon).

Sounds like a great idea! Thanks for writing a ticket for this! @Volker_E

Update: I'm currently waiting for one more round of feedback and should be able to share something as first official iteration in coming days.

This has been documented in Design Systems Team's mediawiki.org page at History of user-interface libraries and frameworks in MediaWiki.

ldelench_wmf subscribed.

Love this addition to our docs, thank you @Volker_E ! Per T322027 this history will likely be moved to a subpage of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design_Systems_Team with navigation provided on the main page.