From: Yaron K. <ya...@gm...> - 2009-09-15 04:09:37
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Hi everyone, As I noted in my Wikimania-wrapup email, there was interest expressed at the conference in getting four of the SMW-related extensions onto Wikipedia: SMW itself, Semantic Forms, External Data and Maps. Last week I flew to San Francisco, California, to meet with MediaWiki Foundation developers to talk about various ideas for for adding forms to Wikipedia in order to make template-call editing easier; I was there, obviously, as the main author of Semantic Forms. The discussion was quite interesting; I got to demo Semantic Forms and some of the rest of the Semantic MediaWiki system to Erik Möller and Brion Vibber, who I guess had never really seen it before (certainly they hadn't fully seen SF before). Members of the Wikipedia Usability team were also there at the meeting. So, to make a long story short: it looks like Semantic Forms is not coming to Wikipedia, at least not anytime soon. Instead, it appears likely that there'll be a system where, in the main 'edit' tab, each template call will be individually editable using a pop-up form, with templates somehow themselves defining what the input should look like for each of their fields. Such a feature is already available on Wikia (which also has Semantic Forms, separately), and the German Wikipedia, as a Javascript "gadget".[1] This new feature would be implemented at least somewhat differently than either of those, though. Personally, after the discussion I think this is the right way to go for Wikipedia. The page structure on Wikipedia can get quite complex, and it would be hard or impossible for Semantic Forms to cover all the layouts that Wikipedia pages can take. That's especially true given that the goal of the system is to be able to edit in-line templates as well, like citation templates. I'll probably be involved in helping create this system; at the very least, giving feedback on the types of features it should contain, given my experience with Semantic Forms. I should also note that, though Semantic Forms has been removed from the list of SMW-connected extensions going to Wikipedia, another may have been added: the Page Object Model extension [2], which I described to the developers, and which they expressed interest in adding for use by Wikipedia bots. So it could be that SMW-spinoff extensions can be added to Wikipedia provided that they don't have a "Semantic" in their name. :) -Yaron [1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Revvar/VM (unfortunately, it's only explained in German) [2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Page_Object_Model |