2009/7/24 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 10:05 PM, Brianna Laugherbrianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
I can imagine someone building an alternative edit interface for a subset of Wikipedia content, say a WikiProject. Then the interface can strip away all the general crud and just provide information relevant to that topic area.
Sweet.
I look forward to the bright future where I can create an enhanced AJAX edit-box for MediaWiki then throw it up with a bunch of ads and private-data-collection and avoid the pesky problem of open sourcing my code and contributing it back to the MediaWiki codebase in order to get it widely used.
This is again something that OAuth can help with. Applications have to register with the service provider before they start using OAuth & the API. That gives the service provider an opportunity to set certain requirements, such as 1) the application must be open source and/or 2) the application must not do certain things such as collect XYZ data.
You could also require applications to not have any ads, although I don't feel we have a moral obligation to protect our users from advertisements from API-using applications.
As for contributing back to MediaWiki (implicitly for use on Wikimedia sites), as I said before, there is necessarily a high barrier to having an extension enabled on a Wikimedia site, and something of a requirement of general across-the-board usefulness (rather than only being applicable to one topic area, as an example).
Toolserver apps are an example of how interesting and useful things can be separate to MediaWiki and complement it. There are also other third parties such as Wikiscanner, Wikirage, WikiDashboard, WikiChanges, WikiMindmap and WikipediaVision, to name a few. That is the "bright present".
Brianna