On Freitag, 18. April 2008, Simetrical wrote:
On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 3:05 AM, Markus Krötzsch
<mak(a)aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de> wrote:
But whenever I see people discussing SMW, I see
talks about syntax and
query performance. Syntax can be changed easily and queries can even be
turned off, and still SMW is useful! Here are some things that SMW
provides beyond parsing square brackets: [etc.]
The point is that it *does* provide so many things. This makes
reviewing it pretty difficult, so it doesn't look likely to get
enabled any time soon, according to my interpretation of statements
I've seen from Brion. Thus we look to alternatives for use on
Wikipedia, which are small and narrow and can be easily reviewed. If
SMW were split into many small modules (possibly all with a dependency
on a small central core) it might stand a better chance of ever being
considered for use on Wikimedia projects.
Great! Just let us know what you need. We can extract and bundle any feature
into a sub-piece of software, and you can decide how small you want it to be
to allow proper review (I am a very picky contribution reviewer myself, so I
feel with Brion here :). But SMW is fairly modular anyway, and I can quickly
separate most functions. The core certainly is the storage API that SMW and
many extensions refer to (the DB schema can be changed, just the store's
object API is somewhat central).
I can provide you with a more detailed overview of the components to let you
decide what you need. In any case that should be easier than rewriting things
from scratch, and it would ensure compatibility with the non-included SMW
functions (which is in our interest even if you want only a small part). So,
if Wikimedia is interested in features that we might possibly provide, then
there appears to be no reason not to challenge us before starting new
projects :-)
You might also contact Wikia, who already did tests before enabling SMW on
their machines. Maybe they have concrete complaints that we should address.
Besides, stuff like tag searches should probably be in the core
software, not an extension. They're a semi-expected feature in fancy
Web 2.0 software these days.
I am happy with moving code to core ;-) But, seriously, even if you go for
completely new implementations, it would be great if we could discuss these
things to make all those additions at least minimally compatible. Is there
currently a core group of people at MW who are interested in that topic? Who
would be likely to develop such an in-core tagging feature anyway?
We may sometimes have trouble finding enough development time in our work
life, but we know how to put our priorities. And we have means to hire people
and to buy servers if motivated by Wikipedia requirements. So far, we have
not seen concrete requests/complaints from the Wikipedia side and have mainly
developed what our current users requested (well, not all of it ;-). Ask and
you will be answered.
Best regards,
Markus
--
Markus Krötzsch
Institut AIFB, Universität Karlsruhe (TH), 76128 Karlsruhe
phone +49 (0)721 608 7362 fax +49 (0)721 608 5998
mak(a)aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de www
http://korrekt.org