Gerard provides an important insight below: The more we are able to decouple the software components that run Wikipedia, the more open it becomes to innovation. It is much harder to change one large piece of software than it is to change and innovate on multiple components that are decoupled from each other through well-defined standards.
I'm making this point, because the recent announcement of Wiki Creole is an important step in this direction. It is only subset of what Mediawiki provides, but may work well for 90% of all users, and it can serve as a critical standard that decouples a (UI-less) wiki engine used through services from wiki editors from additional wiki tooling like bots and converters.
I don't understand Mediawiki enough in detail, but I would argue that separating the rendering from the provision and storage of wiki pages would save the WMF a lot of money. If you managed to unload the rendering to clients, I'd assume the server capacity you provide could be reduced, perhaps significantly.
Dirk
GerardM wrote:
Hoi, It is nice that the pywikipediabot provides certain functionality. The question is how usable is it in the first place when this info is needed interactively. Also when there are more tools that provide a great job, we will get a situation where advances in one tool will egg on the people of another tool to do even better.
Thanks, GerardM
On 7/2/07, *Brian* <Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu mailto:Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu> wrote:
Pywikipediabot provides this functionality under a free license. /Brian On 7/2/07, * Jimmy Wales* <jwales@wikia.com <mailto:jwales@wikia.com>> wrote: Why don't you release this under a free license so that the Wikimedia Foundation could use it? On Jul 2, 2007, at 8:33 AM, Torsten Zesch wrote: > > JWPL - Java Wikipedia Library > > version 0.3 beta is now available > > http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/software/JWPL > > > INTRODUCTION > > Lately, Wikipedia has been recognized as a promising lexical > semantic resource. We present JWPL, a free Java-based Wikipedia > application programming interface, that enables the use of > Wikipedia as a NLP resource by providing efficient programmatic > access to the knowledge therein. > > > FUNCTIONALITY > > Fast access to: > * article text > * categories > * redirects > * links between articles (ingoing and outgoing). > > Discrimination between > * article pages > * disambiguation pages > * redirect pages. > > Available languages: > * English > * German > * Czech > * Ukrainian > > Other languages will be added step by step. > > > DOWNLOAD > > JWPL Java library > http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/software/JWPL <http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/software/JWPL> > > Wikipedia data > (with database scheme optimized for large-scale NLP tasks) > ftp://ftp.tu-darmstadt.de/pub/tud/informatik/JWPL_data > > > LICENCE > > JWPL is free for non-profit and non-commercial use. > > > ABOUT > > JWPL was developed by the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab > at Darmstadt University of Technlogy. > > http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de <http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de> > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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