There is an automated documentation system for the MediaWiki code, that produces online documentation from the comments and tags in the code.

This system uses a open-source documentation system called doxygen ; There are other open-source systems too, such as phpDocumentor, which I think MediaWiki might have used previously. However, there is significant amount in common to what both systems understand, if you use the fairly neutral documentation style that most MediaWiki code does.

So anyway, I was looking at phpDocumentor out of curiosity, and ran it over MediaWiki, and it gave a list of errors or warnings about MediaWiki’s documentation, so I fixed some of those, whilst checking the Doxygen documentation to try and ensure that I wasn’t stuffing things up for everyone else. What happened next when people saw this can (with much poetic license) be described by the following diagram (an arrow between two blue things = something I was trying to change; an arrow between a person and something = their position, or what’s on their mind) :

Oh, and just in case anyone takes this too seriously, creating this diagram was actually just a glorified excuse for me to experiment with Inkscape, something I had been meaning to do for a few weeks. If you’re looking for a vector-based open-source drawing package, it seems pretty good to me, and works fine for me on Windows (as well as being available for Mac OS X and Linux), so give it a whirl if you haven’t already.