On 27.03.2012 09:33, Oren Bochman wrote:

1. JSON - that's not a very reader friendly format. Also not an ideal format

for the search engine to consume. This is due to lack of Support for metadata and data schema. XML is universally supported, more human friendly and support a schema which can be useful way beyond their this initial .

JSON is the internal serialization format. It will not be shown to the user or used to communicate with clients. Unless of course they use JSON for interaction with the web API, as most do.

The full text search engine will be fed a completely artificial view of the data. I agree that JSON wouldn't be good for that, though XML would be far worse still.

As to which format and data model to use to represent Wikidata records internally: that's a different discussion, independent of the idea of introducing ContentHandlers to MediaWiki. Please post to wikidata-l about that.

2. Be bold but also be smart and give respect where it is due. Bots and

everyone else who's written tools for and about MediaWiki, who made a basic assumption about the page structure would be broken. Many will not so readily adapt.

I agree that backwards compatibility is very important. Which is why I took care not to break any code or client using the "old" interface on pages that contain wikitext (i.e. the standard/legacy case). The current interface (both, the web API as well as methods in MediaWiki core) will function exactly as before for all pages that contain wikitext.

For pages not containing wikitext, such code can not readily function. There are two options here (currently controlled by a global setting): pretend the page is empty (the default) or throw an error (probably better in case of the web API, but too strict for other uses).

3. A project like wikidata - in its infancy should make every effort to be

backwards compatible, It would be far wiser to be place wikidata into a page with wiki source using an custom <xml/> tag or even <cdata/> xhtml tag.

I strongly disagree with that, it introduces more problems than it solves; Denny and I decided against this option specifically in the light of the experience he collected with embedding structured data in wikitext in Semantic MediaWiki and Shortipedia.

But again: that's a different discussion, please post your concerns to wikidata-l.

Regards, Daniel