On 9/9/09 9:41 AM, David Gerard wrote: > As Erik points out, at a certain point we have to actually write new > code to support new ideas. Else "projects we could do at Wikimedia" > becomes "projects we can do with a wiki engine."
IMO we need to do that for the projects we already have before we take on new obligations! We still have very poor software support for: * Commons -- We need a sane upload and post-upload workflow (eg review and deletion), and a clean system for handling structured metadata (descriptions, authorship, licence info). Some of this is being worked on now with Michael Dale's video & media work, and the Ford Foundation grant will let us put more resources into the workflow & metadata side, so this is the one I worry the least about. :) * Wiktionary -- Really needs to be rebuilt as a structured system. It's very hard to query Wiktionary or extract its data usefully, and there's a lot of duplicated manual work maintaining it. There was some third-party work done in this direction (Ultimate Wiktionary/WiktionaryZ/OmegaWiki) which was very interesting but never got the community buy-in to push that work back towards the live Wiktionary. * Wikibooks -- We still have very poor native support for multiple-page "books" or "modules", which complicates navigation, search, authoring, and downloading. Tools like the Collection extension are making it easier to download a batch of related pages for offline reading, but someone still needs to build those collections manually and they don't provide other navigation aids. * Wikinews -- Workflow on Wikinews has been aided by tools like FlaggedRevs but is still a bit awkward. Native support for things like exporting feeds of news articles is still missing, leading to a lot of workarounds and manual effort being expended. * Wikisource -- better native support for side-by-side translations, annotations, and extracting/citing primary source material from the other sites like Wikipedia would be very helpful. -- brion _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l