Hi, thanks for the detailed information... my reply inline:
On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 7:20 PM, Bryan Davis <bd808(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
(...)
The high level and non-negotiable needs for integration with Wikipedia
or the sister projects would be:
* Freely licensed client (OSI approved license)
* Offline animated image rendering solution for user-agents that
can't/won't use the client
* Ability to host freely licensed "models" on Commons
* No client interaction with servers not managed by the Wikimedia
Foundation on behalf of the larger Wikimedia movement.
Ideally the authoring tools would also be freely licensed and capable
of being integrated with MediaWiki under the same hosting terms listed
for the client.
What I can imagine as factible is something like what there is already for
any "standard" format like png or ogg: We can define a spec for the
visualization input data (which already is a pretty simple JSON, so it is
just a matter of documentation), and a freely licensed (I'm guessing GPL
here) "player" in JS, implemented as a Wikiwidget. So our tool can be a way
to build and generate these JSONs (but anybody could implement their own)
and export it so wikimedia can host the data. I think that matches your
requirements; it loses part of the interaction on the article (I think that
requires the interaction with external servers you want to avoid) , but is
still a way to allow any user instead of only mediawiki commiters
contribute visualizations. At upload time the content creator can assert
that the content has appropriate licensing (as you do now when uploading
other media)
How do you handle the "Offline animated image rendering solution" for your
current wikiwidgets? What I can think about here is an animated gif
fallback, but that would lose interactivity at all (this is something that
users will be able to do anyway without any implementation effort)
Another (technical) question I have is if there's already something in
mediawiki that would allow users to upload JSON content, or if something
like that should be implemented. Having that would allow users to use later
in markup stuff like {{WikiWidget|WalnutVisualizer:myuser/somecontent}}.
Do you think this approach would work, and would be compatible with the
values of the wikimedia foundation?
Thanks for your time,
D.