globals will be eliminated from MediaWiki replaced by an application object which would be passed to constructors Whether that would be an convenient solution remains to be but certainly PHP makes such object oriented programming models easier than they were in previous versions For the time being MediaWiki programmers will have to work in an environment with some global context At the time of globals were initialised on startup by MediaWiki of these were configuration which are documented in DefaultSettings php There is no comprehensive documentation for the remaining globals