Board Thread:New Features/@comment-26522807-20160208225359/@comment-24473195-20160224234911

Fandyllic wrote: The difficulty upgrading says something about Wikia's relationship with WikiMedia Foundation and it's not good. Yes. Ultimately, the software is developed to cater to WMF's whims and needs. For example, they may keep supporting an old software simply because there aren't any resources to move to a newer one, or to develop it. Or they might not develop or accept patches that will add something that will be definitely good in the long term because the "consensus" is that it isn't needed.

More importantly, the WMF may pursue different paths. For instance instead of the portable infobox, they have another extension for infoboxes that depends on lua. They could conceivably add this to the core at some point, and it may not fit with WIkia's goals. In some cases certain features may conflict with each other.

The bottom line is that MediaWiki is a software like any other, wikia could conceivably abandon MediaWiki and move on to something else. So updating the software simply because the WMF updates it doesn't always make sense.