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

[John Vandenberg]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 1:01 AM, James Forrester<james at jdforrester.org> wrote:
> 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.

And yet ... this is what every successful wiki does.  Wikipedia is
extremely structured.  The writers are not always expected to know the
structure; gnomes do the tidying up.

I would love to see the mediawiki software improved, especially
merging in semantic functionality, but the ability to add semantics is
available.

>> 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.

The Wikisource Bible projects were structured this way by the users.
Magnus surprised us by creating a tool which used the structure which
we had already put in place.

Likewise the templates on Wikispecies are great time savers.  The
existing structure is quite good.  They just need tools to mine it.

--
John Vandenberg