[Foundation-l] Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies?

Wed Aug 26 14:41:05 UTC 2009

2009/8/26 John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Tisza Gergő<gtisza at gmail.com> wrote:
>> EOL is an encyclopedia, Wikispecies is just a raw taxonomy, which is totally
>> useless to the average reader. It is also useless to most readers interested in
>> taxonomies, because it lacks the software features to extract that. It is in a
>> similar position to Wiktionary: a project about relations between things that
>> totally lacks the concept of relations on the software level. That is like
>> publishing text in the form of JPG files. If you are one of the few people
>> specifically interested in taxonomies, you will probably use something that
>> allows you to query and extract the relational data.
>
> While the wiki software layer is very basic, we have many complex
> tools on our toolserver.  Here is a small sample of the projects which
> run on the toolserver.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver/Projects
>
> If you can specify what queries you are most interested in, the
> technical group may be able to write a tool to do this.

I think the point is that the fundamental design of MediaWiki - around
a single block of unstructured information - is not useful for a
semantic project like WSp; there are much better ways of doing it.
Toolserver projects cannot add functionality to the core in a proper
way. Extensions like Semantic MediaWiki try, but in the end we are
trying to 'fix' it, I'm afraid.

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforrester at wikimedia.org | jdforrester at gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]