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

[James Forrester]

2009/8/26 John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com>:
> On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:41 AM, James Forrester<james at jdforrester.org> wrote:
>> 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.

Wikis aren't in general; MediaWiki is. Writing into an unstructured
wiki in a structured, regulated way is a lot of work, and punishes the
humans for our failure to provide the right tools.

> 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.

Asking users to expend a huge level of effort to make their changes
"proper" when a proper system would do it for them is not respectful
and (as shown) not effective. It's impressive that people can edit in
such a well-regulated way that we can programmatically extract
semantic information, but it's not a stable, easy-to-use way of doing
it. It's also fundamentally "anti-wiki", as new users will often make
mistakes that make things worse, not better; biting the newbies built
into the very code.

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforrester at wikimedia.org | jdforrester at gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]