Edit 2019/What are you using? The backend of how your wiki and tools come together: 2024/Main Page

This submission has been designated as a lightning talk at WikiConference North America 2019.

This session proposes to provide a high-level overview of the different parts of MediaWiki and how they fit together, what creates the front-end interfaces that we all use to read and edit, and how the different layers of skins, forms, gadgets and tools fit together on top of that to fully create our end user experience.

In keeping with this year's theme of reliability of information, it is important that we also better understand the systems that lie behind and provide this information. To help fulfil this goal, this presentation is intended to provide context and perspective for all audiences, regardless of technical background. I will be going into many different aspects of MediaWiki and related tools in terms of what they do and how they relate to each other, and indeed do not fully understand some of it myself - there may be some parts of our ecosystem that nobody fully understands anymore. As such, I cannot promise I won't just start insisting some of it runs on witchcraft partway through, but I'll try to keep that to a minimum.

Some of it really is witchcraft, though.