With respect to software development, options for a
Wikinotebooks project would include using as many existing Project Jupyter software components, protocols, and standards as possible. The Project Jupyter homepage indicates: "free software, open standards,
and web services for interactive computing across all programming languages" and that "Jupyter will always be 100% open-source software, free for all to use and released under the liberal terms of the modified BSD license" (
https://jupyter.org/ ,
https://jupyter.org/about ,
https://opensource.org/license/BSD-3-Clause).
Brainstorming, if Wikinotebooks were to utilize their standard communication protocol, users would be able to easily configure, in their account settings, connectivity to their preferred servers and service endpoints.
You'll want to think about resource requirements and funding sources too; software development and ongoing operations and maintenance for a project of this magnitude would require a significant investment over many years.
Wikimedia,
Inspired by computational-notebook technologies including
Project Jupyter and
Jupyter AI, I am pleased to share some ideas for a new Wikimedia sister project:
Wikinotebooks.
A Wikinotebooks project would enable new, wiki-style, multi-user collaboration scenarios with respect to notebook-based computing in a way tightly integrated with the Wikimedia software ecosystem.
With notebook-based computing, multimedia resources could be generated by people and AI, these resources including: 3D graphics, animations, audio, charts, diagrams, figures, graphs, images, infographics, maps, mathematical expressions, pictures, and video.
Editors would be able to log on to Wikinotebooks, create a new notebook, query data from Wikidata, run some program logic (e.g., JavaScript or Python) on that data to generate a chart, save that chart to Commons, and then add that chart to a Wikipedia article.
As envisioned, computational notebooks would be stored on Wikinotebooks, generated multimedia resources would be stored on Commons, and these notebooks
and multimedia resources would remain interconnected. Persisted interconnectivity between data, queries, computational notebooks, and multimedia resources would streamline providing deliverables. For instance, updates to backing data could result in automatic
updates to multimedia resources, e.g., charts, and/or in notifications to interested editors that new revisions were available.
A Wikinotebooks project would, additionally, enhance the development of another proposed sister project:
Wikianswers.
In the event of any interest, I could write a fuller proposal for a Wikinotebooks project on
Meta-Wiki. Thank you.
Best regards,
Adam Sobieski