Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-13301-20170502181922/@comment-11733175-20170508221811

SlyCooperFan1 wrote: You do realize you're completely off the mark here? Yes, the base version of the software we're using is MediaWiki 1.19, but at this point, so much has been backported from MediaWiki 1.25 or even created independently of MediaWiki itself that there isn't any need to upgrade. It doesn't matter if the MediaWiki project maintains 1.19 or not anymore, because Fandom maintains it for us. It has nothing to do with any of this.

There isn't that much that gets backported because it's so tightly integrated into everything else. Security patches get backported, which are generally small, limited in scope and really worth having, but not much else. Backporting in any quantity has the same problems as upgrading - Wikia made too many modifications to make upgrading easy. Sure, there are some features that are similar, but there are others that Wikia doesn't really maintain and have fallen behind.

The V1 API is very, very different to the MediaWiki API (I'm not even sure if it's updated anymore). It provides access to Wikia specific things like avatars, but it a long way short of what the current MediaWiki API supports.