[Foundation-l] Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies?

[John Vandenberg]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:41 AM, James Forrester<james at jdforrester.org> wrote:
> 2009/8/26 John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com>:
>> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Tisza Gergő<gtisza at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> EOL is an encyclopedia, Wikispecies is just a raw taxonomy, which is totally
>>> useless to the average reader. It is also useless to most readers interested in
>>> taxonomies, because it lacks the software features to extract that. It is in a
>>> similar position to Wiktionary: a project about relations between things that
>>> totally lacks the concept of relations on the software level. That is like
>>> publishing text in the form of JPG files. If you are one of the few people
>>> specifically interested in taxonomies, you will probably use something that
>>> allows you to query and extract the relational data.
>>
>> While the wiki software layer is very basic, we have many complex
>> tools on our toolserver.  Here is a small sample of the projects which
>> run on the toolserver.
>>
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver/Projects
>>
>> If you can specify what queries you are most interested in, the
>> technical group may be able to write a tool to do this.
>
> I think the point is that the fundamental design of MediaWiki - around
> a single block of unstructured information - is not useful for a
> semantic project like WSp; there are much better ways of doing it.
> Toolserver projects cannot add functionality to the core in a proper
> way. Extensions like Semantic MediaWiki try, but in the end we are
> trying to 'fix' it, I'm afraid.

Wikis are not unstructured.  The structure is not defined, but it is
added as needed.  Here is a tool that relies on the added structure of
the Wikisource bibles.

http://toolserver.org/~Magnus/biblebay.php?bookname=Genesis&booknumber=1&range=1

And here is the code for that tool:

https://fisheye.toolserver.org/browse/Magnus/biblebay.php?r=1

The more structure provided by the wiki, the better the tools can query it.

--
John Vandenberg