Many people have asked me about the status of Wikidata. My response is
in CVS ;-) (wikidata branch). It's largely a redesign of the existing
namespace system to be more flexible and powerful. Namespaces form the
foundation of Wikidata, as each namespace will be associated with a
virtual table schema. This has necessitated the changes so far, but
these will also be useful for most other Wikimedia projects.
For example, these changes make it possible to define an arbitrary
number of synonyms for each namespace, so that we can finally rename
"Image:" to "File:" without breaking links (and additional synonyms like
"Video:" and "Sound:"). Another new feature are default prefixes, which
make it possible to define that any unprefixed link [[Bla]] in one
namespace will be be prefixed by "Foo:". This could be useful for
Wikibooks, esp. large spaces like Cookbook: and Jokebook:, so that you
can simply type "Carrots" and it goes to [[Cookbook:Carrots]].
Together with the existing namespace filtering, this effectively allows
the creation of "wikis within a wiki". What namespaces are needed can be
decided by each project community without developer interaction, as the
new namespace manager is a special page that a user group can be given
access to.
As you hopefully will agree, the changes that are part of Wikidata don't
just bloat MediaWiki up - they add useful functionality for all projects.
See my CVS commit comment and the Namespace.php docs for further detail.
There's still quite a bit of coding, hacking and testing to do, but I
anticipate finalizing the first milestone in the coming days. This will
also include a design whitepaper for the Wikidata table design, and some
GUI demos.
From now on, I will commit more often -- this is important, I think, to
ensure that people see that work is being done.
What's the timetable? My guesstimates so far have been mostly wrong, so
I'm careful not to make too exact predictions, especially when certain
design decisions haven't been made yet. But I'm fully committed to
further implementing Wikidata and Ultimate Wiktionary in the coming
months. I'll have to take a two-week-break soon to make some extra
money, however.
If you want to work on Wikidata with me, please contact me, and I can
hand out a few tasks. Also, I always appreciate comments on my code --
what is ugly, what should be refactored, etc.
Best,
Erik
