Hi everyone,
Let me introduce myself first. I’m Dev, one of the selected Google Summer of
Code 2011 participants for Wikimedia Foundation. I’m will be working on
Semantic MediaWiki[1], and my project involves trying to make
Special:Ask[2][3] more intuitive for the general user. I’m writing this
email so that you can share your views, comments and insights regarding what
we are hoping to build.
Currently, Special:Ask is targeted towards the power-user to build complex
queries and to get the results in a preferred format, such as RSS feeds or
JSON. Which is brilliant, _if_ you know what you are doing.
For others, who are trying to find a quick answer to a question (“How many
cities are there in Bolivia?”), Special:Ask is tricky to figure out. Queries
which are malformed will give you all results, and the interface allows you
to output data into conflicting formats (try getting a BIBTEX export of all
places in Germany, and SMW will oblige).
These features make the power user happy, while the newbie and dare I say
the average user will be left poring through documentation to figure out how
to get results. The first 5 minutes of their life with Special:Ask is not
pleasant. My intention is to make things easier for them.
One of the ways many others have attacked the problem is by building
extensions for SMW which make it easier to find data or build queries, such
as Halo, Drilldown and Exhibit. These products do a great job, but they have
common aspects (which people at the dev-list were kind to point out) that
could be abstracted out. In short, if we could separate (i) a powerful
result printer and (ii)a clean usable interface, from Special:Ask, then in
the future one could build an awesome query builder/a new result printer/a
data-explorer by writing less code.
My hope is to be able to:
(i) separate these two use cases, and
(ii) bring in more usability to the Special:Ask interface such as a
(a) better auto-complete (which scales with large number of properties, and
helps in writing the query)
(b) more helpful hints for the new user.
Please email me your thoughts about this project. Some of you already know
me a bit (thanks Jeroen, Markus and Neill for your encouraging emails!), and
I look forward to meeting more of you guys.
~Dev Ayon
[1]www.
semantic-mediawiki.org/
[2]
http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Ask
[3]
http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/SemanticMediaWi…