[dlpdev] minutes of london dlp meeting 20th / 10 / 04

[Saul Albert]

Hi Kurt,

thanks for the reply.. good suggestions!

I'm not sure about TikiWiki integration though.. sounds like a task beyond my
meagre skills.. I had trouble using TikiWiki due to it's massive
featurefullness.

> -- web of trust, were people can specify if they only want to lend items to 
> friends, friends of friends, or x-degree friends

this is a great idea though, and I'm hoping that integration with this kind of
system would be a feature of a well thought out re-build of the software.

We've been talking about taking baby steps with the software (the london one)
in the ramshackle way we've done it up until now, and then concentrate on
getting someone shit hot to do a new version that does everything we've wanted
and more... This sounds like that class of feature.

> It's a nice idea, but two things should be considered here:
> a) Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, all articles only contain encyclopedic 
> information (as opposed to other wikis about books, were people can discuss 
> about the contents of the book, write reviews, etc.)
> b) Wikipedia will always only contain articles about books if there is 
> enough encyclopedic information about a book to warrant an article. This 
> means only a small percentage of all books published will ever have an 
> article in Wikipedia.
> 
> Wikipedia will never be the IMDb of books, but the Wikimedia Foundation 
> might launch such a project in the future. There are developers working on 
> a method to collect structured data in a wiki-way and implement it into 
> MediaWiki (Wikipedia's wiki software):
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata

This is a very good point. Any approach to wikimedia would have to be in the
area of developing a new service, rather than direct intervention in Wikipedia
itself.

> >- contact wikipedia and ask them about some kind of partnership arrangement
> 
> What should be arranged here?

I guess the first thing to do is to try and ream the dlpdev.theps.net wiki into
some kind of shape that accurately reflects the status of the project so far,
working on putting the software into public CVS (being done over at the other
list at the moment), then starting the application for funding for proper
programmer time on it, and talking to wikimedia at the same time, scoping out
the possibilities of something like a free imdb for books and bibliographies.
I'm sure there's something along these lines already planned by someone
somewhere in the world.

I'm hoping to have more time to do this wiki-sorting job the week after next,
although if anyone else wants to start making sense of the wiki (be brutal, it
needs it) please go ahead! I just upgraded it to the latest version of
wackowiki... it was getting spammed (in chinese!) so it should be a bit more
stable and usable now..

Cheers,

Saul.