I have been pondering this for some time, and I would like some feedback. I
figure there are many programmers on this list, but I think others might find
it interesting as well.
Are you satisfied with our progress in increasing software sophistication as
compared to, say, increasing the size of datacenters? Personally, I think there
is still too much "reinventing the wheel" going on, and the best way to get to
software that is complex enough to do things like high-fidelity simulations of
virtual worlds is to essentially crowd-source the translation of Wikipedia into
code. The existing structure of the Wikipedia articles would serve as a
scaffold for a large, consistently designed, open-source software library.
Then, whether I was making software for weather prediction and I needed code to
slowly simulate physically accurate clouds or I was making a game and I needed
code to quickly draw stylized clouds I could just go to the article for clouds,
click on C++ (or whatever programming language is appropriate) and then find
some useful chunks of code. Every article could link to useful algorithms, data
structures, and interface designs that are relevant to the subject of the
article. You could also find data-centric programs too. Like, maybe a
JavaScript weather statistics browser and visualizer that accesses Wikidata.
The big advantage would be that constraining the design of the library to the
structure of Wikipedia would handle the encapsulation and modularity aspects of
the software engineering so that the components could improve independently.
Creating a simulation or visualization where you zoom in from a whole cloud to
see its constituent microscopic particles is certainly doable right now, but it
would be a lot easier with a function library like this.
If you look at the existing Wikicode and Rosetta Code the code samples are
small and isolated. They will show, for example, how to open a file in 10
different languages. However, the search engines already do a great job of
helping us find those types of code samples across blog posts of people who
have had to do that specific task before. However, a problem that I run into
frequently that the search engines don't help me solve is if I read a
nanoelectronics paper and I want to do a simulation of the physical system they
describe I often have to go to the websites of several different professors and
do a fair bit of manual work to assemble their different programs into a
pipeline, and then the result of my hacking is not easy to expand to new
scenarios. We've made enough progress on Wikipedia that I can often just click
on a couple of articles to get an understanding of the paper, but if I want to
experiment with the ideas in a software context I have to do a lot of
scavenging and gluing.
I'm not yet convinced that this could work. Maybe Wikipedia works so well
because the internet reached a point where there was so much redundant
knowledge listed in many places that there was immense social and economic
pressure to utilize knowledgeable people to summarize it in a free
encyclopedia. Maybe the total amount of software that has been written is still
too small, there are still too few programmers, and it's still too difficult
compared to writing natural languages for the crowdsourcing dynamics to work.
There have been a lot of successful open-source software projects of course,
but most of them are focused on creating software for a specific task instead
of library components that cover all of the knowledge in the encyclopedia.
_______________________________________________
Wikidata-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
