Board Thread:New Features/@comment-26522807-20160208225359/@comment-24473195-20160421204412

Ciencia Al Poder wrote:

Dessamator wrote: These are 100% easier to add than a full upgrade because they make use of core existing mediawiki libraries. Only when those core existing mediawiki libraries actually exist in the current version used by wikia... which usually doesn't happen because if it would exist it would already be there for use. That's not completely true. A lot more functionality is easily available internally, but wasn't added by the WMF (partly due to performance concerns). Or perhaps because of politics, lack of interest, or anything else.

As an example, there seems to have been a proposal to add a query library, but that didn't make it into the WMF version. That API has been part of mediawiki core for possibly more than half a decade.

Wikia also added the ability to access lua modules globally despite having an older version of Scribunto. This is something that WMF is only now planning to address.