Dear MediaWiki Foundation,
I am writing to request an SVN account to host source code for an extension that we are currently developing for MediaWiki. This extension is being developed by a collaboration of two Northeastern University students and CIM Engineering, Inc (dba "CIM3").
The Software Idea: With 2,073,813 articles in English and growing, Wikipedia is the world's largest collaboratively edited source of encyclopedic knowledge. As more and more people adding content and using it as reference for their research, it becomes important to know what data resides where on the wiki. Users generally do this by book marking page for future reference. Book marking option in web browser let you bookmark the URL, which is generally the whole page. With the amount of content on any given page, it might still take a while to find the content user is looking for. The aim of the projects is to produce an extension that will add Purple Numbers and collaborative tagging capability to MediaWiki. Purple Numbers will provide the following added functionality in MediaWiki.
1. High resolution addressability in a wiki page: With Purple Numbers, MediaWiki user can have high resolution addressibility to a wiki page. The purpose of Purple Numbers is simple: to produce HTML documents that can be addressed with high resolution (also called "fine granularity"). It does this by automatically creating name anchors with static (nidÿÿs) and hierarchical (hidÿÿs) addresses at the beginning of each node, and by displaying these addresses as links at the end of each node.
2. Transclusion: Transclusion is the inclusion of part of a document into another document by reference. Transclusion is best explained by an example. Consider the following scenario a user wants to display some data (picture, chart, etc.) about X on page that mentions X in some other content. With Transclusion, user can reference data about X from the X page without copy/paste the data on their own page. Since the data is referenced and not copied, any changees made to the data will reflect on the userÿÿs page also.
3. Collaborative tagging at node (Purple Numbers) level: Collaborative tagging (also know as folksonomy, social classification, social indexing and other names) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is not only generated by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Freely chosen keywords are used instead of controlled vocabulary.
Some Important Links:
Project Wiki: http://project.cim3.net/wiki http://project.cim3.net/wiki/PMWX
Project Status: http://project.cim3.net/wiki/PMWX
History of Purple Numbers: http://community.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?PurpleNumbers http://www.bootstrap.org/#9B http://www.eekim.com/software/purple/purple.html http://collab.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?PurpleNumbers
Transclusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion
Collaborative tagging: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_tagging
The Team: http://project.cim3.net/wiki/PMWX#The_Team
Thank You Viral Gupta