David Gerard wrote:
On 29 December 2010 08:24, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
To me (and others), that leaves the question of what would happen if you wrote some software that was actually built for making an encyclopedia, rather than the jack of all trades product that MediaWiki is.
MediaWiki is precisely that software. And there's any number of specialist wikis using it that are basically Wikipedia in a specialist area.
No, I don't think MediaWiki is precisely that software. MediaWiki is a wiki engine that can be used for a variety of purposes. It may have started out as a tool to make an encyclopedia, but very shortly after its mission drifted.
Since Wikipedia's creation, there have been countless debates about what an "encyclopedia" is. However, at a most basic level, we can say that an encyclopedia is its content. As an exercise, try retrieving the first sentence of every article on the English Wikipedia. You'll quickly discover it's a real pain in the ass. Or try extracting the birth year from every living person's article on the English Wikipedia that uses an infobox. Even more of a difficult task, if not an impossible one.
MediaWiki was designed to fit a number of ideas: free dictionary, free encyclopedia, free news site, free media repo, etc. And thus its design has been held back in many areas in order to ensure that any change doesn't break its various use-cases.
How do you build a better Wikipedia? By building software designed to make an encyclopedia. That leaves two options: abandon MediaWiki or re-focus MediaWiki. The current MediaWiki will never lead to a "Wikipedia killer." I firmly believe that.
Assuming you focused on only building a better encyclopedia, a MediaWiki 2.0 would put meta-content in a separate area, so that clicking edit doesn't stab the user in the eye with nasty infobox content. MW2.0 would use actual input forms for data, instead of the completely hackish hellhole that is "[[Category:]]" and "{{Infobox |param}}". MW2.0 would standardize and normalize template parameters to something more sane and would allow categories to be added, removed, and moved without divine intervention (and a working knowledge of Python). MW2.0 would have the ability to edit pages without knowing an esoteric, confusing, and non-standardized markup.
All of this (and much more) is possible, but it requires killing the one-size-fits-all model that allows MediaWiki to work (ehhh, function) as a dictionary, media repository, news site, etc. For an encyclopedia, you want to use categories and make a category interface as nice as possible, for example. For a media repository, the categories are in[s]ane and would be replaced by tags. And we won't begin to discuss the changes needed to make Wiktionary not the scrambled, hacked-up mess that it currently is.
You make a "Wikipedia killer" by building software that's actually designed to kill Wikipedia, not kill Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikinews, and whatever else.
This sounds like "software that looks to me on the surface like it was actually built for making an encyclopedia". This is, of course, not at all the same as success.
I'm not sure what "this" is. Can you clarify?
MZMcBride