On 06/04/2008, David Gerard <dgerard(a)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.