Summary

  • Mozilla's October 2020 plan said MDN Wiki edits appeared immediately and could be reverted afterward. Yari would put proposed edits into GitHub pull requests for review before the public page changed.
  • At Yari's 14 December launch, MDN document content had moved from a SQL database to repository files. Those files initially held HTML, while home, profile and search pages still ran on the older Django system.

A correction used to arrive first

Under MDN's old Wiki workflow, an editor could click Edit, use the in-page WYSIWYG tool and save. The change went live, and someone could undo it if it proved unsuitable. Mozilla described that order plainly in its 29 October 2020 account of the coming migration. The mechanism put trust into the act of publishing and cleanup afterward. It also left a contributor to discover acceptance through silence: if the edit stayed, perhaps it was good; if it vanished, perhaps it had failed.

That was a peculiar way to run a reference library used to answer precise web-development questions. The ability to fix a page immediately was valuable, especially for a small error. The same route also let spam appear before anyone checked it. Mozilla's October post called after-the-fact reversion bad for community relations: contributors received little feedback beyond the page's changing state. The site had a correction channel, but not much of a conversation at the point of decision.

The old system made that arrangement a technical burden as well as an editorial one. Document content lived in MySQL. Mozilla's team maintained software for revisions, histories and differences. Readers and writers used the same platform path; the CDN held pages for five minutes partly so editors' changes could show up soon. Mozilla said more than 99% of traffic was document requests from readers. Keeping the editing path fast therefore shaped how the reading path was operated.

Put the proposal where everyone can see the argument

Mozilla's proposed Yari platform changed the sequence. Writers would edit content in a GitHub repository and submit pull requests. A reviewer could comment, request a change and merge the proposal before a build put it on the public site. Readers would receive pre-rendered pages through a CDN. The October plan projected daily deployments and a worst-case 48 hours from contribution to publication. Those figures were Mozilla's aims, not a measured account of every edit after launch.

The PR offered a visible place to argue about a sentence. It could also carry several related page edits together, use automated checks and permit large changes that were awkward in the Wiki editor. Mozilla saw a chance to stop spam before it appeared and to help volunteers improve a proposal rather than silently erase their work later. For the organization, review moved from repair to admission.

For a contributor fixing one small mistake, the cost moved the other way. The in-page WYSIWYG editor disappeared. Mozilla acknowledged that a simple fix would now require GitHub, a pull request and a wait for merge and deployment. The GitHub web interface could handle a small edit without command-line git, but the source file was still a file in a repository. Worse for anyone expecting a gentle Markdown form, the initial Yari content was raw HTML. The launch notice placed Markdown in future plans. Yari did not ship as a Markdown conversion.

December made the gate real

Mozilla announced an MDN beta for 2 November. On 14 December 2020, it said the new platform had launched after that beta period. Editing MDN content now meant submitting a pull request to the official mdn/content repository instead of saving through the old Wiki. Content had moved from a SQL database into files, but the move was selective: MDN's home, profile and search pages still came from the Django-based system at launch. The document path changed before every old service disappeared.

One more dependency surfaced in the following year. Mozilla's July 2021 account notice said MDN accounts no longer served contributors. Anyone who wanted to edit content needed to sign in to GitHub, and Mozilla planned to disable MDN account functionality on 22 July. The editorial gate now sat inside another platform's identity and review tools. That is a concrete change in who could enter the workflow, even while Mozilla continued to invite contributions.

MDN's migration was a decision about where a correction becomes public. The old Wiki made a volunteer's save the first public act and left moderators to reverse mistakes. Yari made a proposal public inside a review thread while keeping the reference page unchanged until a merge and build. Mozilla gained a clearer discussion and a lighter content-serving platform. Contributors gained feedback before their words went live and inherited a longer path to the page. Both sides of that trade were in Mozilla's own announcement before the switch was thrown.