[Semediawiki-user] Notes from Wikimedia developers meeting

[Yaron K. <ya...@gm...>]

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