Sure there's plenty of people who can build a prototype application of this sort -- most people pay mortgages though so it'd be nice (if not required) to get compensated for such work, as you & the wikidata team are.

re the wikidata excuse: it's wise to change one's heading before one's lost. Personally I think anyone creating an smw-based extension will do so far more swiftly (and cheaply) than what the wikidata team currently has in mind, ie, to rewrite SMW (and various of its extensions) almost from scratch. I have proposed the outline of such an application at [[meta:wikitopics]]. I'm even convinced that the SMW-based application as proposed will be faster operationally.

Hoi,

There are several points WHY a centrally administered info box makes sense. The most important one can be found in what the Wikimedia Foundation aims to achieve: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge [1]]. This is what we are about, everything that prevents this from happening are excuses

When you consider the number of articles in most Wikipedias, it is easy to see that the English Wikipedia has more info boxes then many of them have articles. By providing the facility to have centrally maintained info boxes, these info boxes will be extremely light weight as both the information and the labels will be maintained in Wikidata. The result is information that is available for localisation. This localisation consists of translating the labels and possibly the information items. I blogged about this in the past ... [2]

I am an advisor to the Wikidata project and as such it is my job to make these arguments. Denny is the project manager for the Wikidata project and it is his job to ensure that his team will deliver on the agreed deliverables. Having centrally maintained templates is not part of what his team has agreed to or can be expected to deliver in the short term. This is a valid excuse; it is valid for now.

An excuse for the Wikidata development team does not prevent other people from developing this functionality in stead. The basic requirement is for Wikidata to be able to have translatable data items associated with a Wikipedia article. As each of those items are uniquely identified, they can be identified in a template. This template should only refer to the data items.

When this functionality is developed, the basic functionality is ready to consider the use of such templates for real in Wikidata clients.

I am confident that there are plenty people who have the expertise to make a functional prototype. Such a prototype can be reviewed by any MediaWiki reviewer for the usual MediaWiki criteria. When this is done, it is no longer an unreasonable burden for the Wikidata team to consider the functionality of such prototypes.

Thanks,

Gerard

[1] www.wikimediafoundation.org

[2] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2012/05/wmdevdays-wikidata.html

On 13 June 2012 00:03, <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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