On 7/6/15, S Page <spage(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Sun, Jul 5, 2015 at 10:41 PM, Brian Wolff
<bawolff(a)gmail.com> wrote:
First of all, the links at the beginning, should
not go directly to
the projects in question, they should go to pages explaining how to
use those projects in question on the outside.
Agreed, T104282 'Create landing pages for the free open knowledge sources
on the Data and Developer Hub.'
If they wanted to just
visit the wiki, they would have done that (Perhaps, this was already
planned, and the current version is still just an early draft with not
all the pieces in place yet?)
Second, the existing showcased projects, seem to much like the sort of
thing someone making a mobile Wikipedia App would want. Most people
probably don't want article excerpts in their search results (I assume
anyways). Most people aren't searching through a list of Wikipedia
articles, unless they are wikipedia or related to wikipedia.
But we do have one of the largest collections of (mostly) organized
knowledge available for free (In both senses of the word). This is
valuable, and quite unique on the internet. We should capitalize on
this.
Things like "Show a short snippet about this topic from Wikipedia" (+
a link to more information) could be quite useful to many people.
Sure, that's Hovercards. It's a subset of
http://devhub.wmflabs.org/wiki/API:Page_info_in_search_results#Showing_usef…
and I mention it at the end. Should we provide more than sample API calls?
Would a JS module that formats the results be useful?
Well not precisely hovercards (Although it is the same idea).
Hovercards is basically a rewrite of NavPopups with a more "aesthetic"
UI. As such ultimately its targeted at ourselves. Ideally we would
emphasize things that fully target outsiders, as they are the audience
of this. We don't want people to think, "oh here's some code from the
Wikipedia website I could maybe sort of reuse", we want them to think
"Oh here's some awesome way I could augment my project with
information from Wiki[pm]edia. Alas, we don't have a wide pool of
projects to draw on that are targeted at outisders as the first (and
perhaps only) intended user, and making new ones would probably be a
lot of effort that I'm not sure anyone at the moment would volunteer
to do...
But yes, maybe a js snippet that people could just insert into pages
that display roughtly what a hovercard would, might be a good idea. I
was kind of thinking of, how you often see movie related sites display
imdb widegts with a films rating.
The interesting challenge is how to identify
"this topic". Will websites
manually link to Michael Jackson (radio commentator)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_%28radio_commentator%29> or
just link "Michael Jackson" and hope for the best? Should we be
evangelizing wikidata numbers like Q6831566 for external apps?
Well, as the saying goes, "There are two hard things in computer
science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors". I
don't think there are easy answers to this one that will satisfy all
users, and ultimately that may be getting to far into an
implementation to worry about, at least at this stage.
Another thing sites can do is related content, I just learned about
CirrusSearch's morelike: search operator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srsearc…
. Such page retrieval and searches all tend to query for lead image and
textextract or wikitext description, so articles on them would overlap, but
that's OK.
Commons is another great resource because its information can be
easily broken up into digestible parts like a
single image (Which is
much harder for a Wikipedia article). I think things like
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/PhotoCommons which would allow a
website operator to quickly allow their users to add stock photos to
whatever it is their users do, is a good thing to focus on.
Wikidata seems almost custom made for the type of user who would like
to add cusom knowledge to their website.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Dev.wikimedia.org/Contributing , you can
propose these and if you know of examples doing this, even better.
Wikidata is so new (especially given the status of its querying
ability), I'll be honest I haven't seen much in the way of doing
things like this. But it seems brimming with potential.
The other thing that should definitely be on the
dev hub, is probably
a link to our terms. We should emphasize that you can use your data,
and we generally don't track you the way a facebook like button does.
That you don't need an api key or anyone's permission. Of course we
should also state what you do need to do (Give credit/follow license,
set a user-agent header)
Yup T317 '"Terms of Use" must be prominently featured in the Developer
Hub'. I was thinking of mentioning it in the three adding it to the footer,
but maybe that's not prominent enough.
Terms Of Use were slightly different than what I had in mind. More a
friendly paragraph explaining responsibilities (Attribution, SA).
Terms of use is rather long legal document, that mostly satisfies the
needs of the WMF legal department (which don't get me wrong is
important, and should be linked to definitely) than what the community
feels is most important when reusing content.
--
bawolff