2009/12/15 geni <geniice(a)gmail.com>om>:
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.