On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 5:31 PM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.comwrote:
Let me put it a simpler way: I don't support moving to Semantic MediaWiki, which to me as user seems like a somewhat arcane and bloated piece of software that will require me and lots of people to relearn how we write documentation and project tracking, unless you can show why the changes you want to make are A) necessary B) require SMW to accomplish them. Demonstrating that the high level structure proposed will work before making the more drastic change seems like a good way to convince everyone that what's being proposed is the right path toward a better wiki for all.
Have you tried SMW? Unless you are heavily editing templates you won't need to relearn anything and neither will anyone else. The system is hidden from you behind normal MediaWiki templates. In many cases the templates are also editable via forms, which actually makes it far easier to edit than regular MediaWiki. If you are a content organizer that modifies templates and likes to make structures easier for for readers and editors, SMW actually makes it much easier to do things that are otherwise impossible in MediaWiki without inflexible bots. Writing bots is a lot harder than learning SMW.
Are you also opposed to wikidata? The vast majority of what's being proposed for wikitech is functionality that will also be available at some point in wikidata. When that's available we can switch to that system, rather than SMW.
- Ryan