On Freitag, 18. April 2008, Simetrical wrote:
On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 3:05 AM, Markus Krötzsch
mak@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de wrote:
But whenever I see people discussing SMW, I see talks about syntax and query performance. Syntax can be changed easily and queries can even be turned off, and still SMW is useful! Here are some things that SMW provides beyond parsing square brackets: [etc.]
The point is that it *does* provide so many things. This makes reviewing it pretty difficult, so it doesn't look likely to get enabled any time soon, according to my interpretation of statements I've seen from Brion. Thus we look to alternatives for use on Wikipedia, which are small and narrow and can be easily reviewed. If SMW were split into many small modules (possibly all with a dependency on a small central core) it might stand a better chance of ever being considered for use on Wikimedia projects.
Great! Just let us know what you need. We can extract and bundle any feature into a sub-piece of software, and you can decide how small you want it to be to allow proper review (I am a very picky contribution reviewer myself, so I feel with Brion here :). But SMW is fairly modular anyway, and I can quickly separate most functions. The core certainly is the storage API that SMW and many extensions refer to (the DB schema can be changed, just the store's object API is somewhat central).
I can provide you with a more detailed overview of the components to let you decide what you need. In any case that should be easier than rewriting things from scratch, and it would ensure compatibility with the non-included SMW functions (which is in our interest even if you want only a small part). So, if Wikimedia is interested in features that we might possibly provide, then there appears to be no reason not to challenge us before starting new projects :-)
You might also contact Wikia, who already did tests before enabling SMW on their machines. Maybe they have concrete complaints that we should address.
Besides, stuff like tag searches should probably be in the core software, not an extension. They're a semi-expected feature in fancy Web 2.0 software these days.
I am happy with moving code to core ;-) But, seriously, even if you go for completely new implementations, it would be great if we could discuss these things to make all those additions at least minimally compatible. Is there currently a core group of people at MW who are interested in that topic? Who would be likely to develop such an in-core tagging feature anyway?
We may sometimes have trouble finding enough development time in our work life, but we know how to put our priorities. And we have means to hire people and to buy servers if motivated by Wikipedia requirements. So far, we have not seen concrete requests/complaints from the Wikipedia side and have mainly developed what our current users requested (well, not all of it ;-). Ask and you will be answered.
Best regards,
Markus