On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Quim Gil <q...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> With my hat of third party wiki admin I personally agree with all this. > > Another possibility further down in the roadmap: > > Imagine a World in which you could transclude in your wiki content from > a subset of this interwiki table of wikis, based on license > compatibility and whatever other filters. To avoid performance problems, > the check with the sources could be done by a cron periodically, etc. > > The most interesting part of this proposal is to start an interwiki > table of friendly and compatible wikis willing to ease the task of > linking and sharing content among them. The attributes of the table and > a decentralized system to curate and maintain the data could open many > possibilities of collaboration between MediaWiki sites. > Is there reason to think that a decentralized system would be likely to evolve, or that it would be optimal? It seems to me that most stuff in the wikisphere is centered around WMF; e.g. people usually borrow templates, the spam blacklist, MediaWiki extensions, and so on, from WMF sites. Most wikis that attempted to duplicate what WMF does have failed to catch on; e.g. no encyclopedia that tried to copy Wikipedia's approach (e.g. allegedly neutral point of view and a serious, rather than humorous, style of writing) came close to Wikipedia's size and popularity, and no wiki software caught on as much as MediaWiki. It's just usually more efficient to have a centralized repository and widely-applied standards so that people aren't duplicating their labor too much. But if one were to pursue centralization of interwiki data, what would be the central repository? Would WMF be likely to be interested? Hardly anything at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects has been approved for creation, so I'm not sure how one would go about getting something like this established through WMF. Some advantages of WMF are that we can be pretty confident its projects will be around for awhile, and none of them are clogged up with the kind of advertising we see at, say, Wikia. Non-WMF wikis come and go all the time; one never knows when the owner will get hit by a bus, lose interest, etc. and then the users are left high and dry. That could be a problem if the wiki in question is a central repository that thousands of wikis have come to rely upon. Perhaps the MediaWiki Foundation could spearhead this? Aside from its nonexistence, I think that organization could be a pretty good venue for getting this done. I'll have to bring this up with some of my imaginary friends who sit on the MWF board of trustees. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
