Author: olivier.beaton
Description:
90% of core special pages should be made into their own extensions. With the new installer now detecting extensions and asking if you want to turn them on, there is no reason to not split out non-essential functionality (to the basic idea of wiki editing) from the core.
Why would we want to maintain two different systems / places of defining messages, loading extensions, etc? Why not build the most robust and complete extension handling system we can (and eat our own dog food).
This would also more easily support other bundlings of MediaWiki with their own set of extensions tailor chosen to their use case (SMW+) etc. For example on my wiki I could care less about dead end articles, I'm not in the business of wasting people's time (not a loaded statement at all!).
There's already talk of moving core non-essentials into extensions:
- Old Editor https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28856
- Magic links https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26207
There's some talk of bundling must-have extensions instead of core-ifing them:
- ParserFunctions https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26261
- Anti-spam https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9034
And many new features have been made into extensions now instead of going into the core (WikiEditors, Vector, etc).
If there is acceptance for this I'd be willing to start helping convert SpecialPages at least into their own extensions.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement