Hi Rexford, What objectives would we achieve if we were to "revamp the MediaWiki system from ground up"? Even if we pretend that we have infinite financial and human resources to do this, I am not sure what we would accomplsh, and we would likely introduce a lot of new reliability and security bugs. Perhaps Maryana can give us an update about the Commons app, so I'm pinging her. Pine On Aug 15, 2014 7:46 PM, "Nkansah Rexford" <nkansahrexford(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks Jeroen, you just reminded me I have a thread here to respond to. I agree with you points. I said revamp the mediawiki from ground up because I think the mediawiki was developed some years ago, and its obvious there are many changes that have taken effect that need adapting to. "Revamping" here doesn't mean deleting all the code for mediawiki, and starting from the first function name { bla bla } thing and coming up. However I mean sitting back, and spending time to extract the actual portion that is required for the basic functioning of the wiki, remove the portions that are not needed, adapt it for today's best practices and features, and as the word "Revamp" means: *"give new and improved form, structure, or appearance to."* The WikiWand guys did a similar thing to the look of Wikipedia, and I think they're in the right direction. Adapting to changes on the wikis, I think its one of the hard-to-change things the wikimedia ever want to do, and same with the MediaWiki system. Though most of the changes to the WikiWand thing were UI based in particular, the MediaWiki system can also take a similar approach and "revamp" things up to improve speed and efficiency, and will give room for more possibilities, I think. I think when the media wiki is re-made today, decisions that'll go into it will be different from the ones made in its beginning. rexford | google.com/+Nkansahrexford | sent from smartphone On Aug 18, 2014 10:17 PM, "Jeroen De Dauw" <jeroendedauw(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 08/16/2014 04:09 AM, Chad wrote: INCREDIBLY OFFTOPIC: In 2011 I gave a talk called "Learn Tech Management in 45 Minutes" that included an idea like this as an example! http://opensourcebridge.org/wiki/2011/Learn_Tech_Management_In_45_Minutes#P… This is also a talk in which I talk about the Drake equation, Betamax, Max Weber, my older sister, and the S-curve of innovation, quote from the Communist Manifesto, and constantly refer to executives as "suits". The transcript still makes me laugh so you might like it too. BACK ON TOPIC: So, one reason we have an Individual Engagement Grants program https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG#ieg-learn is to support innovative approaches to solving key problems for the Wikimedia movement. So go forth and innovate! (Next IEG round has a 30 September deadline for proposals.) I am enspoused to a science fiction writer. Just now we brainstormed a bunch of ideas: Browser plugins, wearables, weekly call-in radio shows/editathons about particular topics (ask an expert for info that's missing and add it to articles), Twitter bots that remind people they can edit Wikipedia if they link to a Wikipedia page and comment on it, pseudo-AI/expert systems to help give constructive criticism to new editors, distributing hardware to potential users, integrating Wikipedia editing into language classes for more obscure languages, data mining from bibliographies & other primary sources to synthesize stubs for entries that should exist but don't https://github.com/brainwane/missing-from-wikipedia , implementing the Ada Initiative's recommendations http://adainitiative.org/2013/11/wikimedia-diversity-conference/ , support for audio/video chat for dispute resolution and collaboration.... (OFFTOPIC AGAIN: My spouse's novel "Constellation Games" http://constellation.crummy.com/ has a minor character who edits Wikipedia.) OK, maybe I am being rambly and silly right now because I'm about to go on vacation. I'll be offline for a few weeks, back on September 10th. You know what would be great while I'm offline? Offline access to Wikipedia, via a mobile app! (I finally got back ontopic! Yay me!) Best wishes, Sumana Harihareswara