Hi John,
Being only a "minor" member of the SMW community, I'd like to respond to some of your assumptions you made about the SMW community as whole.
... cessation of SMW development
"Some of us" where worried at beginning of the wikidata project but I think Markus tried to ease those fears a bit in his email from 01 May 2012 (see [1]).
SMW subjectively seems to be encountering quality control issues lately
SMW as a community relies on its members to ensure quality control and if you look at the commit/review statistics than you can see that only a handful of people have actively committed work for SMW 1.7/SMW 1.8 which means to exercise quality control the community is relying on those actively involved.
... performance of client sites will be affected
I can't talk about performance in relation to wikidata but I can see from a SMW perspective that several efforts are being considered to cease unnecessary overhead (see [3] [4] [5]). Of course some extensions that use SMW as basis such as Semantic Drilldown have yet to come up with an intelligent caching strategy to minimize its impact on performance. (For example in our case we have nearly 1.5M triplets and we can feel when Semantic Drilldown is doing a database select with a large filter set).
... [[wikidata]] is doomed for not creating stakeholders within the wiki-user community that includes SMW developers
Some of the SMW core developers are actively involved in the wikidata project therefore this fear might be less suited but as a member of the SMW community I'd like to see that SMW and wikidata share "some" common code base as it would help to ensure quality control in future and those who know the wikidata code base may feel encouraged to commit to SMW as well.
SMW and wikidata certainly have a divergent target audiences but as a community member I hope to see a symbiotic relationship between SMW and wikidata without having to refute neither of both.
[1] http://wikimedia.7.n6.nabble.com/SMW-and-Wikidata-Was-SMW-devel-Semantic-Med...
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/SMW_and_Wikidata
[3] http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/GSoC_2012#Accepted_proposal
[4] http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Roadmap#JavaScript_base_for_dynamic_r...
[5] http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/GSoC_2012#SMW_query_management_and_sm...
Cheers,
mwjames
On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 7:03 AM, jmcclure@hypergrove.com wrote:
Denny said: On the other hand, you are not the only person thinking that this (Wikitopics) is a good idea (hello Gerard!), and in the long run Wikidata could be extended to such a system -- but for now I regard this to be out of scope for Wikidata and I will not devote resources for this. It can be added later anyway.
Denny,
I never see the long-run! Anyway, to get real, be aware there are specific concerns about [[wikidata]] within the SMW community in the here and now:
we worry that our sites are threatened by virtual cessation of SMW development -- this may already be happening a bit as SMW subjectively seems to be encountering quality control issues lately
we worry that, whenever we install the [[Wikidata]] extension, then the performance of client sites will be affected by the burden of multiple forms, query and format software modules, syntaxes, styles, artifacts etc
we worry that, since no specific problems experienced by wiki-users have yet been identified that [[Wikidata]] will "fix", in the end, [[wikidata]] is doomed for not creating stakeholders within the wiki-user community that includes SMW developers.
jmc
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