The discussion to add a full-fledged programming language to MediaWiki is yet another example of this. Rather than evaluate existing tools which allow for user-interface extensibility, the developers would rather embed PHP within PHP. This allows you to do a variety of things:
* Simulate the brain * Write MediaWiki within MediaWiki * Compute any function * ... * Write an enyclopedia?
Our neural simulator contains an embedded dynamic language called C^c. It is interpreted C++. I assure you that it does not aid in usability. Our software did not start to become truly usable until we tackled the issue of user-extensible interfaces.
This issue has already been tackled in MediaWiki, and yet the solution to all of our problems is claimed to be a well-designed embedded scripting language. This is the largest possible hammer you could apply to the problem. I can't see how it is a reasonable next step.
2009/1/15 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu
Access to svn does not imply access to MediaWiki. Changes to MediaWiki have been almost entirely up to core developer discretion, and as I have demonstrated, 'consensus' has largely implied that they, and only they, thought the changes made Wikipedia better. The ideas are rarely presented to the community in a formal, well-designed demo format (as SMW has been, time and time again), and they are not evaluated for their usability. When a usability issue arises third party tools are not properly considered. Rather, they reinvent the wheel in an inferior manner.
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Denny Vrandečić < dvr@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de> wrote:
That's pretty much exactly what Semantic MediaWiki offers.
SMW has developed a lot, since many of you saw it. By now, you may
- switch off inline queries if you are afraid they won't work fast enough
- get rid of the ugly syntax everyone is scared about (and simply hide
it all in templates by using the #declare function)
- have all that data sitting there inside the DB and export it in
standard data formats like RDF or JSON (ok, well, the last one is *almost* finished)
We would be very much interested in having SMW tested on a labs machine with a copy of a reasonably big Wikipedia (e.g. German).
And, just to take note to the title of this thread -- I never thought and the developers never gave me the feeling that the software is out of reach for the community. Access to SVN was swiftly granted, and both Tim and Brion were always giving encouraging and valuable feedback to us.
Cheers, denny
Magnus Manske wrote:
On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 9:57 AM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu
wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
The other useful thing that can be done with templates is to standardise the field names in them as much as possible per wiki.
The reason? To enhance machine readability of data in them. People are SERIOUSLY INTERESTED in this.
Another useful thing: after an article is parsed, write all the templates it uses and their parameters in the database. Even if at
first
it isn't possible to read this data on Wikipedia, Toolserver could do wonders with it :)
People (including yours truly) have been asking for this for years...
Magnus
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