[Foundation-l] Do we have a complete set of WMF projects?

[Brion Vibber]

On 9/9/09 9:41 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> As Erik points out, at a certain point we have to actually write new
> code to support new ideas. Else "projects we could do at Wikimedia"
> becomes "projects we can do with a wiki engine."

IMO we need to do that for the projects we already have before we take 
on new obligations!

We still have very poor software support for:

* Commons -- We need a sane upload and post-upload workflow (eg review 
and deletion), and a clean system for handling structured metadata 
(descriptions, authorship, licence info).

Some of this is being worked on now with Michael Dale's video & media 
work, and the Ford Foundation grant will let us put more resources into 
the workflow & metadata side, so this is the one I worry the least about. :)


* Wiktionary -- Really needs to be rebuilt as a structured system. It's 
very hard to query Wiktionary or extract its data usefully, and there's 
a lot of duplicated manual work maintaining it.

There was some third-party work done in this direction (Ultimate 
Wiktionary/WiktionaryZ/OmegaWiki) which was very interesting but never 
got the community buy-in to push that work back towards the live Wiktionary.


* Wikibooks -- We still have very poor native support for multiple-page 
"books" or "modules", which complicates navigation, search, authoring, 
and downloading.

Tools like the Collection extension are making it easier to download a 
batch of related pages for offline reading, but someone still needs to 
build those collections manually and they don't provide other navigation 
aids.


* Wikinews -- Workflow on Wikinews has been aided by tools like 
FlaggedRevs but is still a bit awkward. Native support for things like 
exporting feeds of news articles is still missing, leading to a lot of 
workarounds and manual effort being expended.


* Wikisource -- better native support for side-by-side translations, 
annotations, and extracting/citing primary source material from the 
other sites like Wikipedia would be very helpful.

-- brion