2009/12/15 geni geniice@gmail.com:
Wikipedia is probably not able to drive change (not least because we've probably hit the limits of the software) but it is able to be involved with it.
Yes, the software is suffering a paucity of developers and certain structural problems due to early decisions that turned out bad (e.g. wikitext is near-impossible to formalise, making WYSIWYG difficult). But mostly it's a paucity of developers.
For example the popularity of wikipedia applications related to augmented reality shows that it able to be involved with change. On the other hand we have no way to drive use of 2D barcodes pointing at wikipedia articles and thus we can't really be involved with augmented reality below the level that GPS reaches.
The thing there then is to get the API into shape. At present it's highly usable for bots, etc - in fact, bots are suggested-to-required to use the API rather than screenscraping. Next step is to evangelise the API to relevant groups of geeks. To keep it UK, I suggest the perlmongers spring to mind :-)
- d.