Hey guys,
I've read a lot on the whole wikidata thing in the past view month. The whole project will IMO be a enourmous advantage not only to mediawiki and wikipedia but also to the whole idea of free information.
I think, however, that most of you concur with me in this point.
There are loads of amazing ideas in the minds of all us and in meta.wikimedia.org, so this is not the point ;)
What the project lacks of at the moment is a better coordination and organisation.
I think that we should link the idea of wikidata with some other improvements that mediawiki needs, especially better semantic web abilities, iow. a xml in- and output implentation, the possibilty to tag articles with a standart (as for Jimbo's "1.0"-proposal) and maybe also a improved discussion system (liquidthreads).
So I propose to take all this together and call it MediaWiki 2.0 resp. phase4. I know, the idea of MediaWiki 2.0 existed all the time as a "dream for the future" with no atcual plans for the moment.
But why not start working more target-aimed? When to start, when not now?
Even if you think that this is too much for one task, IMO we should do this just for wikidata as well.
So I propose to do the following:
- create a newsgroup "gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki.wikidata" or "gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki.2-0" to discuss the stuff there instead of on [[talk:wikidata]] - and, which is very important, decide ASAP how to implent wikidata into the database, there are quite a few models flowing around in meta.wikimedia.org (e.g. after a last regarding of pros and cons of the different models in the newly created newsgroup ;) ) - decide ASAP in which areas of the current mediawiki code major changes are needed (e.g. if we want to rewrite the parser to support different output formats natively or if we just include a xml/rdf output abilty into the existing code
when all this is and further discussion is done we should
- create a new cvs branch 'mediawiki20' (or use the wikidata tag that does already exist) or a new module 'phase4' - create a roadmap which shows the *concrete* steps towards the realisation
I think we have enough guys out there who're more than willingly to help coding, but the problem is that no one really knows where to start ..
Concerning myself, I think I will not be able to write too much of code myself, because my little freetime is already rather occupied, but I'd love to contribute to the project as much as possible.
best regards, Frando