[Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?

[Brian]

Access to svn does not imply access to MediaWiki. Changes to MediaWiki have
been almost entirely up to core developer discretion, and as I have
demonstrated, 'consensus' has largely implied that they, and only they,
thought the changes made Wikipedia better. The ideas are rarely presented to
the community in a formal, well-designed demo format (as SMW has been, time
and time again), and they are not evaluated for their usability. When a
usability issue arises third party tools are not properly considered.
Rather, they reinvent the wheel in an inferior manner.

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Denny Vrandečić <dvr at aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
> wrote:

> That's pretty much exactly what Semantic MediaWiki offers.
>
> SMW has developed a lot, since many of you saw it. By now, you may
> * switch off inline queries if you are afraid they won't work fast enough
> * get rid of the ugly syntax everyone is scared about (and simply hide
> it all in templates by using the #declare function)
> * have all that data sitting there inside the DB and export it in
> standard data formats like RDF or JSON (ok, well, the last one is
> *almost* finished)
>
> We would be very much interested in having SMW tested on a labs machine
> with a copy of a reasonably big Wikipedia (e.g. German).
>
> And, just to take note to the title of this thread -- I never thought
> and the developers never gave me the feeling that the software is out of
> reach for the community. Access to SVN was swiftly granted, and both Tim
> and Brion were always giving encouraging and valuable feedback to us.
>
> Cheers,
> denny
>
> Magnus Manske wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 9:57 AM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu>
> wrote:
> >> David Gerard wrote:
> >>> The other useful thing that can be done with templates is to
> >>> standardise the field names in them as much as possible per wiki.
> >>>
> >>> The reason? To enhance machine readability of data in them. People are
> >>> SERIOUSLY INTERESTED in this.
> >> Another useful thing: after an article is parsed, write all the
> >> templates it uses and their parameters in the database. Even if at first
> >> it isn't possible to read this data on Wikipedia, Toolserver could do
> >> wonders with it :)
> >
> > People (including yours truly) have been asking for this for years...
> >
> > Magnus
> >
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