2009/8/26 John Vandenberg <jay...@gmail.com>: > On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:41 AM, James Forrester<ja...@jdforrester.org> > wrote: >> 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. > > Wikis are not unstructured.
Wikis aren't in general; MediaWiki is. Writing into an unstructured wiki in a structured, regulated way is a lot of work, and punishes the humans for our failure to provide the right tools. > The structure is not defined, but it is > added as needed. Here is a tool that relies on the added structure of > the Wikisource bibles. > > http://toolserver.org/~Magnus/biblebay.php?bookname=Genesis&booknumber=1&range=1 > > And here is the code for that tool: > > https://fisheye.toolserver.org/browse/Magnus/biblebay.php?r=1 > > The more structure provided by the wiki, the better the tools can query it. Asking users to expend a huge level of effort to make their changes "proper" when a proper system would do it for them is not respectful and (as shown) not effective. It's impressive that people can edit in such a well-regulated way that we can programmatically extract semantic information, but it's not a stable, easy-to-use way of doing it. It's also fundamentally "anti-wiki", as new users will often make mistakes that make things worse, not better; biting the newbies built into the very code. J. -- James D. Forrester jdforres...@wikimedia.org | jdforres...@gmail.com [[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
