On 06/04/2008, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On Thursday night, I went to London PerlMongers social drinks and guzzled ridiculous quantites of Adnam's Oyster Stout and talked rubbish with geeks.
Good times!
- I told the story of why MediaWiki is written in PHP. (Magnus had
read up on PHP to make some changes to NuPedia code, and decided he needed a project. So Phase 2 is Magnus' first ever proper PHP program ...)
I hadn't heard that before - explains a few things.
- They really want machine-readability from Wikipedia. The infobox
templates on Wikipedia are getting there. Mostly what they need is standardisation (is the image called "image", "Image" or "Img"?), and a base template that's {{Persondata}} or a reasonable approximation. This is a matter of parser-functions in the template wikitext on the 'pedia, but it's something someone needs to take on as a project: to re-plumb the templates without breaking the nice exposed external interface. Who knows parser-function code and is feeling ambitious and patient?
Is it worth getting Wikipedia to use Semantic MediaWiki? It would allow for much more powerful machine-readability than templates, but probably has hundreds of obstacles to trip over to get there.