Technical wiki standards (was: Re: [Foundation-l] Request for approval for a wiki for standards

Sat Jan 7 15:37:37 UTC 2006

Hi everyone interested in wiki standards:

If you are talking about technical standards (wiki markup, 
interlinking, interchange, etc.):

At WikiSym 2005 (www.wikisym.org) many of the Wiki engine 
implementors met (including Brion Vibber) to tackle the issue of 
standardizing wiki protocols once more. (Attempts have been there for 
ages, but with limited progress.)

Previous attempts were made on a couple of independent sites, 
including Ward's Wiki, Meatball, CommunityWiki. None of these sites 
was really representative of the whole community, so we decided to 
have a new attempt supported by WikiSym and its community, i.e. a 
mailing list 
(http://www.wikisym.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wiki-standards) and 
a wiki (http://wiki.wikisym.org). The mailing list is working, the 
wiki (a MediaWiki installation) has been dormant so far as we are 
gearing up only now. Also, we don't really require that the standards 
writing process takes place on one particular wiki---rather we felt 
it was ok if people do stuff on their own site (or consolidate what's 
already there) and the submit it for community review and approval.

To the extent that you are talking about general technical standards 
rather than Wikimedia Foundation site standards, and you would like 
to ensure that wiki engine implementors are included, I would like to 
make the case that a new organization like WikiSym may be a better 
place than a WMF site. (More on that if you are in fact talking about 
technical standards.)

In any case, I invite everyone to look at the WikiSym site. WikiSym 
2006 will take place in Denmark in August and will be co-located with 
ACM Hypertext 2006 and sponsored by ACM SIGWEB. CfP will be out real 
soon now :-)

Dirk

----
Dirk Riehle, ph: +49 172 184 8755, web: http:/www.riehle.org
Interested in wiki research? Please see http://www.wikisym.org!
Take a Geek's Tour of the Silicon Valley! http://www.ageekstour.com

At 07.01.2006, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>Hoi,
>
>On Meta the request for a Wikistandards wiki has been revived. The
>request was voiced at a conference of language standards in  Berlin (Dec
>12-13, 2005). A significant number of people from the language standards
>community have indicated on Meta that they are interested to actively
>support this effort. See:
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikistandards
>
>Just a few of the people who have expressed interest in working on a
>Wikistandards project run by Wikimedia:
>
>* Professor Alan K. Melby, Brigham Young University, member of the Board
>of Directors and chair of the Translation and Computers committee,
>American Translators Association and many other affiliations, see
>http://www.ttt.org/akm-cv.html
>* Donald A. DePalma, President and CRO: Common Sense Advisory, Inc.;
>author: Business Without Borders, member of the Board of Directors of
>the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA), chair of the
>Language Standards for Global Business Summit, more:
>http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/about_us/management.php?id=1
>* Keiran Dunne, Assistant Professor of French, Pennsylvania State
>University * Dr. Jennifer DeCamp, principal engineer at MITRE Corporation, a
>federally funded Research and Development Center, where she provides
>software testing and advice on foreign language technology. She has
>worked with localization issues since the 1970s.
>* Peter Reynolds, Lionbridge Technologies, involved with the XLIFF and
>Translation Web Services standards.
>* Tex Texin, Internationalization Architect, Yahoo, Inc. Tex Texin has
>been providing globalization services including training, strategy, and
>implementation to the software industry for many years. See
>http://www.global-conference.com/iuc27/biosabstracts/b058.html 
><http://www.global-conference.com/iuc27/biosabstracts/b058.html> for
>details.
>
>The purpose of Wikistandards will be to discuss standards and to
>formulate drafts on the wiki. Informative encyclopaedic texts would be
>written on Wikipedia. As it is of importance for a standard to be known
>and thereby to be a Standard, many people at the conference indicated
>their willingness to translate these articles to other languages for
>other Wikipedias as well. The terminology involved with standards would
>get its place in WiktionaryZ (the name suggested to replace "Ultimate
>Wiktionary").
>
>Wikistandards itself will be a new project in its own right. It does not
>fit into Wikibooks since the discussions and drafts will be original
>works developed by the standards communities. There will be a portal
>dedicated to language standards, but hopefully, we will get other
>standards communities interested as well. Wikistandards will also make
>use of content in our other projects.
>
>One reason why a wiki like this makes sense is because the Wikimedia
>Foundation is known for its NPOV, it is not part of academia or the
>business world and, as importantly, we have a great track record in
>managing large amounts of content. We can hope for great synergies
>between the standards community and the Wikimedia community.
>
>On the most basic level, Wikimedians will help the standards experts to
>learn the ropes, and to structure the wiki in a way that makes sense.
>But we also have a very real need for being involved in or close to
>standardization processes, particularly language standards, as we will
>make increased use of them in our projects.
>
>On the Unicode website, Wikipedia is already the only website that is
>singled out for its use of UTF-8. With the WiktionaryZ project,
>supporting standards will become even more important as we will have ALL
>languages and people from ALL locales using one database. We have
>discussed using standards like CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) for
>localization and TBX (TermBase eXchange) for exporting terminology. In
>the future we may even make use of TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) to
>integrate WiktionaryZ with industry standard computer-aided translation
>(CAT) tools. Other standards will be relevant for relation types and
>other meta data.
>
>In the process of standardization, Wikimedia will only set one standard
>of its own: a standard of freedom. Any standard we use in our projects
>must be fully documented, free to use and free to implement, or we do
>not consider it a standard in the first place. What better way to ensure
>that than by being involved, as a neutral party, in the standard
>process?
>
>Given that we have a lot of enthusiasm for this project and given that
>it provides us with a win win situation, I do ask for your permission to
>set up this project in the very near future.
>
>Thanks,
>  GerardM
>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l