I share Sumana's and Max's concerns. The lead paragraph and the lead
sentence of the article are indeed meant to provide a good, stand-alone
summary of the subject, withing the limits of their corresponding lengths.
The guidelines concerning these are located at
WP:LEAD<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_sect…
its section
WP:BEGIN<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_sec…ce>,
respectively. The changes you suggest as an example for the Madonna article
are actually largely compatible with the spirit of those guidelines. I
suggest you to become familiarized with both as you review your proposal.
You should also take a look at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Concise_Wikipedia, which presents several of
the use cases you already mention. The "Related projects/proposals" section
of that page is particularly interesting for seeing what others have
already proposed/implemented.
In summary, I think your proposal *could* be useful if it implemented a way
to provide subject-specfic layouts for the article leads or first sentences
(e.g. highlighting the birth date if it's a person, etc), but
Wikidata<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction>kind of
renders such a heuristic and/or manual annotation approach
obsolete, since those pieces of information will be explicitly annotated as
such and in a much universal way than the current semantic markup systems
such as PERSONDATA <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Persondata>. Not
to mention the advantage of not requiring manual sync between the
"cardified" data and the current lead section, and also the ability to use
the same set of data in any Wikipedia, and indeed, in any site of the web
as Wikidata matures.
My suggestion is to reconsider your proposal, but I would like to leave you
a word of encouragement, since you clearly had a good idea (the fact that
many before you have thought of ways to tackle the same problems ratifies
that), and took the time to investigate existing implementations (i.e. the
Popups) and create a detailed exposition to your plan. I'm sure your GSoC
project, whatever you choose, will have good chances of success. Keep up
the good work!
On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 1:56 PM, Sumana Harihareswara
<sumanah(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
On 04/07/2013 02:52 PM, Max Semenik wrote:
On 07.04.2013, 20:11 Paul wrote:
Indeed. We have a Universal Language Selector for
3rd party websites
already. This one would be super-duper great. This is where Wikidata
can play its part as well!
As for images, we have already a PageImages
extension in all wikis,
and we have Wikidata, where item properties may point to images.
Also, there's Navigation popups[1] while with
api.php?action=query&prop=extracts you can get the text of page lede,
or N first sentences. To summarize, almost everything (or
eveerything) needed for this project is already available, so in a
couple hours of hacking it should be possible to hack the navpopups to
work in the way described in the proposal. I wonder how much reasearch
have the proposer done before making it public? Nevertheless, I'm not
saying that this proposal is not worth a SoC, however it should be
heavily revised based on input from this thread, then we could decide
if it has enough potential.
I'm glad Gaurav shared this proposal with us so early so that we can
help with criticism and other feedback. Everyone else reading this
who's thinking about proposing a summer project: please tell the list
ASAP so we can help you too!
I think my main concern regarding Gaurav's proposal is the same one
Yaron mentioned in
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_talk:Grv99 : as
our guidelines state, "YES to projects already backed by a Wikimedia
community. NO to projects requiring Wikipedia to be convinced."
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013#Your_project
Gaurav, the reason we have these guidelines is that we have seen past
failures and want to avoid them in the future.
Maybe you could consider thinking about what you are really interested
in and finding a more achievable way of working towards that within the
structure of GSoC. For example, if you want to ensure that there's a
canonical photo and one-sentence summary associated with every article
topic, maybe you could work with Wikidata on that -- and then a future
student can improve the Navigation Popups gadget (and spread it across
all the wikis) to make use of the photo and summary sentence. That's
just one idea for an approach that's more likely to succeed.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l