Hi, thanks for the detailed information... my reply inline:
On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 7:20 PM, Bryan Davis bd808@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.