On Wednesday, April 3, 2013 at 2:18 AM, Ryan Lane wrote:
Spend some time editing a well designed Semantically enabled wiki. Web Platform is a good example: http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Main_Page. There's a high degree of structure there. That wiki is way above average quality from the point of view of a reader specifically because it enables the editor to easily make the content consistent.
OK, given your experience with Web Platform, I'd like to get your assessment of what sort of engineering and design effort was required. What you are proposing is considerably more ambitious in scope (Web Platform doesn't integrate with bug management and SCM), but some napkin cost analysis could be very useful. Web Platform has very good usability and design. Even if the basic blocks for a semantically-enabled wikitech are there, there is still a large additional investment of designer time and effort that would be needed to make it usable and well-integrated. But how much? (Input from designers would be useful, too.)
The goal stated by this proposal is engagement of new contributors. Before committing to the full scope of the project, it would be good to comb through this and identify one or two things that could be implemented easily and that would be expected to demonstrate a measurable impact on the number of new contributors. We should not wait for a project like this to be finished in toto before examining the correctness of the initial hypotheses.
Ori