I share Sumana's and Max's concerns. The lead paragraph and the lead sentence of the article are indeed meant to provide a good, stand-alone summary of the subject, withing the limits of their corresponding lengths. The guidelines concerning these are located at WP:LEAD<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section>and its section WP:BEGIN<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section#First_sentence>, respectively. The changes you suggest as an example for the Madonna article are actually largely compatible with the spirit of those guidelines. I suggest you to become familiarized with both as you review your proposal. You should also take a look at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Concise_Wikipedia, which presents several of the use cases you already mention. The "Related projects/proposals" section of that page is particularly interesting for seeing what others have already proposed/implemented.
In summary, I think your proposal *could* be useful if it implemented a way to provide subject-specfic layouts for the article leads or first sentences (e.g. highlighting the birth date if it's a person, etc), but Wikidata<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction>kind of renders such a heuristic and/or manual annotation approach obsolete, since those pieces of information will be explicitly annotated as such and in a much universal way than the current semantic markup systems such as PERSONDATA <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Persondata>. Not to mention the advantage of not requiring manual sync between the "cardified" data and the current lead section, and also the ability to use the same set of data in any Wikipedia, and indeed, in any site of the web as Wikidata matures. My suggestion is to reconsider your proposal, but I would like to leave you a word of encouragement, since you clearly had a good idea (the fact that many before you have thought of ways to tackle the same problems ratifies that), and took the time to investigate existing implementations (i.e. the Popups) and create a detailed exposition to your plan. I'm sure your GSoC project, whatever you choose, will have good chances of success. Keep up the good work! On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 1:56 PM, Sumana Harihareswara <suma...@wikimedia.org>wrote: > On 04/07/2013 02:52 PM, Max Semenik wrote: > > On 07.04.2013, 20:11 Paul wrote: > > > >> Indeed. We have a Universal Language Selector for 3rd party websites > >> already. This one would be super-duper great. This is where Wikidata > >> can play its part as well! > > > >> As for images, we have already a PageImages extension in all wikis, > >> and we have Wikidata, where item properties may point to images. > > > > Also, there's Navigation popups[1] while with > > api.php?action=query&prop=extracts you can get the text of page lede, > > or N first sentences. To summarize, almost everything (or > > eveerything) needed for this project is already available, so in a > > couple hours of hacking it should be possible to hack the navpopups to > > work in the way described in the proposal. I wonder how much reasearch > > have the proposer done before making it public? Nevertheless, I'm not > > saying that this proposal is not worth a SoC, however it should be > > heavily revised based on input from this thread, then we could decide > > if it has enough potential. > > I'm glad Gaurav shared this proposal with us so early so that we can > help with criticism and other feedback. Everyone else reading this > who's thinking about proposing a summer project: please tell the list > ASAP so we can help you too! > > I think my main concern regarding Gaurav's proposal is the same one > Yaron mentioned in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_talk:Grv99 : as > our guidelines state, "YES to projects already backed by a Wikimedia > community. NO to projects requiring Wikipedia to be convinced." > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013#Your_project > > Gaurav, the reason we have these guidelines is that we have seen past > failures and want to avoid them in the future. > > Maybe you could consider thinking about what you are really interested > in and finding a more achievable way of working towards that within the > structure of GSoC. For example, if you want to ensure that there's a > canonical photo and one-sentence summary associated with every article > topic, maybe you could work with Wikidata on that -- and then a future > student can improve the Navigation Popups gadget (and spread it across > all the wikis) to make use of the photo and summary sentence. That's > just one idea for an approach that's more likely to succeed. > -- > Sumana Harihareswara > Engineering Community Manager > Wikimedia Foundation > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
