Respendent :
I think mediawiki’s lack of a true admin control panel is part of the problem. Even if there were a “dial home” feature, if it were located on a new special page, most people wouldn’t even know to look at it. Besides the difficulty in the actual upgrade process, the absence of a centralized admin management area is probably the biggest barrier to use of the software.

I agree here. Though openness is one thing, intuitive management for a (technical) person is another.

Some kind of control panel, only visible to certain users would certainly be a hugh improvement and opens a lot of possibilities.

Though behind the scenes it could be another Special-page. It would certainly have to be accessable from another place aswell. Like the personal tabs on top, or the toolbox.

like my.wiki/Special:Management?page=component. Where component could be ‘maintaince’, ‘extensions’, ‘skins’, ‘update’ etc.

It would be good to see a graph of age-of-MediaWiki-release-being-used versus number of users & edits, but I’d expect that there would be correlation there – i.e. smaller wikis running much older releases on average, versus larger ones run by active volunteers or employees having much more recent versions.

So the sites who most need to upgrade are likely to be the smaller wikis – and a great way to make that easier would be by having a control panel, showing:
a) if there were upgrades available [with an opt-out capacity, but probably enabled by default].
b) a GUI to configure the wiki to reduce spam.
c) list of recent additions/edits made by other people.

The current approach of lots of special pages provides a high barrier-to-entry for people who want to set up a simple wiki and have low a maintenance overhead. It’s unlikely that people decline to upgrade per-se, rather more likely that they decline to put themselves through the perceived/anticipated grief of the upgrade process when there’s no easy graphical way of upgrading.

Jon :

First, I’m curious as to how those numbers reflect the real world. I mean, according to that there is maybe a thousand or two installs of MediaWiki, tops? And are they unique hosts? or domain names? Or what? Wikia uses 1.15.4 (as a base), and they’ve got a lot of domains. Obvious the Foundation itself is excluded from these numbers too.

It’s a sample, the numbers are relative to the sample size, they’re not absolute. The PDF indicates that they scanned the root path on 1 million .com domains, randomly selected from a list of 87 million domains.

Ellie K :

Interesting and ironic that the WikiMedia Technical Blog uses WordPress.org. I would be curious why you didn’t use MediaWiki, though there may have been exogenous factors.

They do different things.

I imagine it just needs to be implemented?

Having said that, i’m not sure how many people will actually take action after being notified, if the upgrade process wasn’t a “click this button” type of upgrade. I know I once stopped using software, simply because it too often tried to tell me I needed to upgrade.

Also, another major difference. If you don’t upgrade WordPress, you _will_ get compromised. MediaWiki… you’re safer (not saying you shouldn’t, simply that it is much less likely). Complacency is bad, but even still, WordPress has been hit numerous times to the likes of which Mediawiki has never seen.