New subject: [Wikidata-l] Accelerating software innovation with Wikidata and improved Wikicode

24 Jul 2013

I've had some discussions with people on the Mathematica Stack Exchange site about the
project. There is interest, but most people don't seem to have as much free time as
me. So I've decided just to start the project as a way to organize and integrate my
own code and code that I find. I'm just putting it all in subpages of my Wikipedia
user page for now. If I ever run into problems I will retreat to a more constrained
mechanism. I kicked things off last night by adding some code for the "Solar
cycle" article. The article has a nice chart that shows the total solar irradiance
measurements over the past few decades, although it hasn't been updated in a few
years. So I added some code to grab the raw data from the World Radiation Center in
Switzerland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wakebrdkid/Wikicode
http://meta.mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/collaborative-pack…

On Sat, Jul 13, 2013 at 2:33 AM, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Hoi Michael,
The one thing that makes it easy for you is that you speak English. For other languages
there are not the same amount and diversity of resources. While I have my reservations
about the feasibility of what Scott proposes, his proposal is for all the Wikipedia
languages and then some.

If he is able to achieve his thing "only" for the Wikipedia languages it will be
a roaring success in my eyes.
Thanks,      GerardM

On 13 July 2013 09:21, Michael Hale &lt;hale.michael.jr(a)live.com&gt; wrote:

Hi Scott,
I'm personally very interested in the future of online education, and I appreciate
your enthusiasm about the subject. However, I wonder if your energy would be more
productive if it was directed to an older project. Have you heard of Wikiversity? It is
already multilingual and doesn't have advertisements from hosting on Wikia. However,
even though I knew about Wikiversity when I was still in high school, I've actually
been surprised at how little I've used it over the years. I think it is trying to
solve a problem that I never encountered. I think learning is one of the easiest things to
do on the internet, and it has been even easier in the post-Wikipedia era now that so much
of the most important information has been well summarized, consistently formatted, and
heavily linked. If I check my YouTube subscriptions right now, I get free, full-length
lectures in my feed from Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Yale, UCLA,
Technion, UPenn, IIT Bangalore, and Cornell. I remember when MIT OpenCourseWare first came
out, and it's been incredible to see how e-learning has flourished since then. I have
over a hundred YouTube channels that are primarily educational. My needs are met if I know
what I'm looking for or if I just want to be surprised by some current, stimulating
educational content. The software library initiative we have been discussing in this
thread would be a hybrid of a wiki and a regular source control system typically used in
open source projects. Like I said, I can still think of several reasons why it might not
work, but I keep finding myself thinking a few times every week that maybe we should try.

Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 17:58:38 -0700
From: worlduniversityandschool(a)gmail.com
To: wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org

Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Accelerating software innovation with Wikidata and improved
Wikicode

Hi Michael and Wikidatans, 
I just created a beginning, wiki Software Library at World University and School - see
Software Libraries: http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Software_Libraries for the
initial resources - and added links to this in the following WUaS, wiki subjects - 

see the WUaS Computer Science wiki subject page for this and related links - 
http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Computer_Science#World_University_and… -

Educational Software: http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Educational_Software - 
Library Resources: http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Library_Resources -

Programming: http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Programming .  
WUaS, which is like Wikipedia with MIT OCW, plans to develop in all 7,105+ languages and
204+ countries, - for open, wiki teaching and learning, in addition to free, C.C., MIT
OCW-centric, university degrees, beginning in the U.N. languages after English - so not
only will this extensible WUaS Software Libraries find form in all languages and
countries, but WUaS's plans to move to Wikidata will make this a database. MIT-centric
WUaS students will eventually add to, and develop, these libraries greatly I suspect. 

Best regards, Scott

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 10:19 AM, Michael Hale &lt;hale.michael.jr(a)live.com&gt; wrote:

I completely agree that wiki-projects are exemplary organic growth models compared to the
way plans are made by Congress. I certainly support using information technology to move
governments toward more direct and efficient forms of democracy. I would love to see
things like income tax levels determined in real-time based on the average preferences of
everyone's e-government web preferences. Many people still don't have internet
access though. I think when a person comes up with a plan they typically consider 2 or 3
factors in a qualitative manner in their mental model of the system and disregard other
side effects as insignificant. That paper used a model with 10 or so factors in a
quantitative manner. There are many things it leaves out, but such plans are still useful
as counterweights in policy arguments against ideas that are extreme in other directions.
Regardless, a person couldn't design by hand the circuit layout of the processors that
are currently in our computers and phones, and the number of problems that are too big for
our brains that computers are helping us with is expanding. If we had a way to design
computational models in a wiki manner then we could just add the irrigation and insect
migration effects to the model to gauge its sustainability, then other people could make
each part of the model more accurate, etc. I think it would help us find real solutions to
many problems in a much faster way than listening to political speeches or exchanging
paragraphs of imprecise human language on social networking sites.

Re: [Wikidata-l] Accelerating software innovation with Wikidata and improved Wikicode