The Architecture of Open Source Applications (Volume 2): MediaWiki
www.aosabook.org/en/mediawiki.html
From the page
Saved with the link. Notes from 2007 to 2016 are mostly the page's own words, so this is probably an excerpt.
So, from the start, the needs and actions of a constantly evolving community of Wikipedia participants have affected MediaWiki's development, and vice versa. The architecture of MediaWiki has been driven many times by initiatives started or requested by the community, such as the creation of Wikimedia Commons, or the Flagged Revisions feature. Developers made major architectural changes because the way that MediaWiki was used by Wikipedians made it necessar