Re: [Semediawiki-user] Notes from Wikimedia developers meeting

[Sergey C. <ser...@gm...>]

Great news! I hope this will pave the way for semantics to be introduced
within Wikipedia.

And I'm glad that Page Object Model library / extension got some interest
too, thanks for promoting it.

        Sergey


--
Sergey Chernyshev
http://www.sergeychernyshev.com/


On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 12:09 AM, Yaron Koren <ya...@gm...> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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