2009/7/24 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>om>:
On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 10:05 PM, Brianna
Laugher<brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
I can imagine someone building an alternative
edit interface for a
subset of Wikipedia content, say a WikiProject. Then the interface can
strip away all the general crud and just provide information relevant
to that topic area.
Sweet.
I look forward to the bright future where I can create an enhanced
AJAX edit-box for MediaWiki then throw it up with a bunch of ads and
private-data-collection and avoid the pesky problem of open sourcing
my code and contributing it back to the MediaWiki codebase in order to
get it widely used.
This is again something that OAuth can help with.
Applications have to register with the service provider before they
start using OAuth & the API. That gives the service provider an
opportunity to set certain requirements, such as 1) the application
must be open source and/or 2) the application must not do certain
things such as collect XYZ data.
You could also require applications to not have any ads, although I
don't feel we have a moral obligation to protect our users from
advertisements from API-using applications.
As for contributing back to MediaWiki (implicitly for use on Wikimedia
sites), as I said before, there is necessarily a high barrier to
having an extension enabled on a Wikimedia site, and something of a
requirement of general across-the-board usefulness (rather than only
being applicable to one topic area, as an example).
Toolserver apps are an example of how interesting and useful things
can be separate to MediaWiki and complement it. There are also other
third parties such as Wikiscanner, Wikirage, WikiDashboard,
WikiChanges, WikiMindmap and WikipediaVision, to name a few. That is
the "bright present".
Brianna
--
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/