On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 10:13 AM, Daniel Kinzler <daniel(a)brightbyte.de> wrote:
Magnus Manske schrieb:
I agree about Semantic MediaWiki, which is a
different beast (and
might one day be used on Wikipedia).
That's really the question. Should we work *now* on making it usable for
wikipedia, or should we focus on something simpler?
IMHO we should try to harvest the data that is already in Wikipedia
first. Semantic Wikipedia, technical issues aside, relies heavily on
users learning a new syntax, which is a community (read: political;-)
decision. And it will be fought about much harder and longer than the
license question...
The question
seems to be scalability.Extrapolating from my sample data
set, just the key/value pairs of templates directly included in
articles would come to over 200 million rows for en.wikipedia at the
moment. A MediaWiki-internal solution would want to store templates
included in templates as well, which can be a lot for complicated
meta-templates. I think a billion rows for the current English
Wikipedia is not too far-fetched in that model. The table would be
both constantly updated (potentially hundeds of writes for a single
article update) and heavily searched (with LIKE "%stuff%", no less).
Would the RDF extension be up to that?
It would in a way: it just wouldn't store all parameters. It would store only
things explicitly defined to be RDF values. That would greatly reduce the number
of parameters to store, since all the templates used maintenance, formatting,
styling and navigation can be omitted. It would be used nearly exclusively for
infobox-type templates, image meta-info, and cross-links like the PND template.
Or at least, that'S the idea. It also does away with problems caused by the
various names a parameters with the same meaning may have in different templates
(and different wikis).
Nice! I was thinking along the lines of a template
whitelist/blacklist, but yours would be much more efficient. And it
would hide most of the technical "ugliness" in the templates.