Wikipedia:Software Phase IV

So far, Phase IV is no more than a working title: the actual real software is current Wikipedia:Software Phase III. It is unclear what would distinguish the evolution of Phase III from the creation of Phase IV. But it's a nice name to focus discussion.

There are a number of ideas floating around for Phase IV.

Stability:

• achieve stability before adding any more features?

Performance:

• better caching of rendered page content?
• rewriting SQL queries to be more efficient (under way)
• decouple SQL queries from PHP code?
• ensure only standards-compliant SQL, to allow portability between different database implementations
• splitting page server and database (easy)?

Integration and decoupling: pushing the boundaries around:

• support all languages with new software?
• integrate the user database across languages?

• decouple page design, layout and skins from main engine

Scalability:

• scalability to millions of articles and millions of hits per day
• controlling algorithmic complexity is vital: use indices, avoid O(N) or worse operations
  • move away from MySQL to Postgres or something else?
  • using a cluster of page servers (easy)?
  • using clustered database software (hard!)?
  • supporting multiple server farms (hard, and difficult to administer)
• need to eliminate the recent changes bottleneck that limits edit rate?
  • multiple categories for articles? -- is this a good idea, or a bad idea?

Functionality:

• add new features from current want list...
• + article scoring, reputation system

Fancy new features:

• semantic links?
• Bayesian article classification?
• data-mining the Wikipedia text for semantics?

See also: meta:T1wiki