I tend to agree that MW focus should be on the web applications - including mobile. However a free (and ad-free) third-party Adobe AIR app that integrates new web features with services offered by other sites in ways not otherwise allowed by WMF policies - might be interesting for folks that enjoy browsers like Flock and such (which I know is a surprisingly large audience) I'm not personally that socially oriented (beyond sharing things on FB, Twitter and G+) - so chat and such wouldn't interest me personally. As far as the app experience, I do occasionally use Mac OS X Dictionary's ability to browse Wikipedia from time to time. That pretty much fills that void for me the few times a year I feel it. -greg aka varnent On Dec 27, 2011, at 4:15 PM, John Du Hart wrote:

Am 27. Dezember 2011 22:39 schrieb Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan(a)gmail.com>om>: I suggest the Wikimedia Foundation set up a Diaspora pod and a StatusNet server for Wikimedia users to communicate. As a Wikipedian I would like to have my social network accounts on a Wikimedia server. We could also run an IRC or a Jabber server of our own for chatting. Regards, Jürgen.

Am 27. Dezember 2011 23:24 schrieb Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan(a)gmail.com>om>: Again: No desktop software, but a cloud solution. Even though I am now posting from a Google account, we do not need Google or indeed any other company for that, we can do it ourserves, there are free alternatives we can set up for the community. Regards, Jürgen.

Actually, I don't think Wikipedia or Wikimedia Foundation has to do everything. They just need to maintain this platform: Wikipedia, just like Microsoft just needs to maintain Windows and let third party developers to develop apps for Windows. On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 6:51 AM, Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan(a)gmail.com> wrote:

The idea behind this program idea is that I have long felt Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia; it's the biggest "ontology" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science) ) ever made on the Web. Just like GPS (Global Positioning System) gives every location in this world a unique set of coordinates, Wikipedia gives every concept in this world a unique ID (which is the concept's Wikipedia article title); and Wikipedia's link structure can guide you to navigate to a concept even if you initially don't know the concept's name. Put another way, just like DNS (Domain Name System) can resolve a domain name to an IP address, browsing Wikipedia can resolve a felt concept in your mind to a unique "address" for that concept (which is the concept's Wikipedia URL). So Wikipedia is an infrastructure for topic identification and navigation just like GPS is an infrastructure for location identification and navigation, and upon this platform there can be a rich ecosystem of topic-oriented apps. It can revolutionize how people announce and find stuff (currently we use Google and keywords to announce and find stuff, like products, but you know keywords have their own limitations, such as the synonym problem and the problem of catching a complex concept with keywords, while Wikipedia can always give you a unique ID for your felt concept, no matter how complex it is). On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 5:30 AM, Gregory Varnum <admin(a)wikiqueer.org> wrote:

I know this is somewhat out of topic. Sorry about that. Technical discussions should go elsewhere. (11/12/28 6:39), Yao Ziyuan wrote: No, it's not. The Web with only one site, wikipedia.org, is not interesting at all. s/website/websites/ and that's how the Web behaves already. What might be missing is the direction for readers of an entry to find the "right" place to chat/share. Wikipedia currently implements this as a section, namely, "External Links". Indeed a separate program that aids users to find the right link among all the links in the external links section could be useful. In any case, asking wikipedia.org to become the only place where all the chatting/sharing happen is just not realistic, and that's not ideal either in my homble opinion. (11/12/28 6:51), Yao Ziyuan wrote: I think it is always better to find existing places for chatting/sharing. Your program could maintain a community editable mapping from Wikipedia entries to chat rooms/visual forums. You mention yet another protocol based on HTTP headers. Believe me, there are already tons of protocols like that. Reusing an existing one might give you a better starting use base. Developing your program as a Flock add-on would have the same effect too. (The ideal situation is indeed if there's Wikipedia mirrors as playgrounds for MediaWiki extension.) (11/12/28 6:08), Yao Ziyuan wrote: Since you mentioned this, if you haven't heard of Semantic MediaWiki(SMW)[1], an MediaWiki extension, already then you might want to bring your idea to that community too. If I recall correctly, Wikipedia couldn't (or hasn't) adopt SMW for performance reason, but there's a starting project called WikiData[2] from the Germany branch of Wikipedia Foundation. [1] http://semantic-mediawiki.org/ [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata Cheers, Kenny -- W3C HTML5 Chinese Interest Group: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-ig-zh/