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

[Brian]

Domas, that is an unfair characterization of my e-mails, which I do not
believe you have read in full.

I have only advocated SMW + SF as a method of allowing users to extend the
user interface. I am not interested in SMW for "academic data crunching."
DBPedia is  wonderful project for people with those interests. Mine are in
modeling the brain, and I have in the past tried to predict wikipedia's
quality. I don't know if you were at that talk, but I believe I remember you
at that conference.

I don't care all that much about ontologies. I am not a semantic web guru. I
have pointed out that these technologies provide a means for users to design
the interfaces and that these technologies have been overlooked by
developers. They do not provide usability in niche cases, which you would
know had you read my e-mails. They potentially improve usability in 75% of
articles by providing custom tailored user interfaces.

But had you read my e-mails you would also know that I do not advocate
enabling the extensions unmodified, but giving them proper consideration and
refactoring the minimalist set of features that would be useful into
something that is scalable.

That is, I want to discuss the how the process of adding new features to
MediaWiki is broken, and how this has been a specific example.


On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 7:31 AM, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello Brian,
>
> thanks for all  your insights, bashing and vocal support of your pet
> ideas.
>
> I understand, that SMW is academically interesting concept (though
> there're contradicting ideas in academia too, suggesting natural
> language processing as an alternative, and this seems where currently
> research tries to go too), and it provides "usability" in niche cases
> (academic data crunching).
>
> I fail to see why you associate SMW with general usability we're
> trying to think about? Is that something we simple mortals cannot
> understand, or are you simply out of touch from reality?
>
> See, our project is special.
>
> a) We have mass collaboration at large
> b) We end up having mass collaboration on individual articles and topics
> c) We have mega-mass readership
> d) We have massive scope and depth
>
> And, oh well, we have to run software development to facilitate all
> that. As you may notice, the above list puts quite some huge
> constraints on what we can do.
> All our features end up being incremental, and even though in theory
> they are easy to revert, it is the mass collaboration that picks it up
> and moves to a stage where it is not that easy (and that happens
> everywhere, where lots of work is being done).
>
> So, you are attacking templates, which have helped to deal with nearly
> everything we do (and are tiny, compared to overall content they
> facilitate), and were part of incremental development of the site and
> where editing community was going. Of course, there are ways to make
> some of our template management way better (template catalogues, more
> visual editing of parameters, less special characters for casual
> editors), but they generally are how we imagine and do information
> management.
>
> Now, if you want to come up with academic attitudes, and start telling
> how ontology is important, and all the semantic meanings have to be
> highlighted, sure, go on, talk to community, they can do it without
> software support too - by normalizing templates, using templates for
> tagging relations, then use various external tools to build
> information overlays on top of that.  Make us believe stuff like that
> has to be deployed by showing initiative in the communities, not by
> showing initiative by external parties.
>
> Once it comes to actual software engineering, we have quite limited
> resources, and quite important mandate and cause.
> We have to make sure, that readers will be able to read, editors will
> be able to edit, and foundation will still be able to support the
> project.
> We may not always try to be exceptionally perfect (Tim does ;-), but
> that is because we do not want to be too stressed either.
>
> So, when it comes to reader community, software is doing work for
> them. Some of readers end up engineering software to make it better.
> When it comes to editing community, software does the work for them.
> Some of editors end up engineering software to make it better.
>
> Which community are you talking about?
>
> BR,
> --
> Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]
>
>
>
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