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Wikimedia and KDE Cooperation Announced

Posted by Zonk on from the wikitacular dept.

eean writes "As reported by KDE Dot News, today Jimmy Wales, chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation, announced the beginning of a cooperation between Wikimedia and the KDE project at LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, Germany. As the first applications, like the media player amaroK, start to integrate Wikipedia content the idea is to create a webservice API to access the information from Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia or Wiktionary."

10 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Why Amarock and not Konqueror or word processing? by climb_no_fear · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I don't want Amarock searching Wikipedia every time I'm listening to my mp3s. I already know who sang the song - they're my legal copies (not living in US).

    Wouldn't it be a better use of resources to incorporate this into a browser or word processor? You could look highlight any word(s) on the web page and, like Firefox searches Google, search Wiki.

    Wouldn't that be nice?

  2. Will this affect our Leaders at Google? by HaFBaKeD · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It seems this kind of collaboration, in a lot of ways, will allow people to bypass having to launch a browser and use our favorite search engine to find the information they are looking for. Granted, its only from one resource right now, but for the masses, in most cases, they'd probably be pretty happy with that. Cutting down on the time spent trying to find relevant google results alone is a huge bonus, as many out there have trouble properly narrowing down their searches to begin with.

    --
    "A war over religion is like fighting over who has the best imaginary friend."
  3. A very good thing by m50d · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wikipedia in your media player is one of the things you don't notice you were missing until you have it, after which it's indispensible. I hope other projects start to take advantage of the bindings, hopefully not just within KDE but elsewhere as well. This should benefit everyone.

    --
    I am trolling
  4. right idea, wrong example by X_Bones · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Who needs media player to interact with an encyclopedia? I already know who sings the songs I listen to. I've already bookmarked the band's web site, which has more photos and lyrics than Wikipedia could collect. I've seen the IMDB entry on the movie I'm watching, or I have the box it came in. What's the point?

    Now, something like an e-book reader tied to a service like Wiktionary would be far more useful. I think a lot more people would take advantage of something like this (particularly those with handleld wireless devices).

    --

    the coolest club on /.
    1. Re:right idea, wrong example by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2, Insightful
      I've already bookmarked the band's web site, which has more photos and lyrics than Wikipedia could collect.
      Yes, in a 800x600 Flash applet, which loads in a popup window. Thankyouverymuchbutnothanks.
  5. WebServices -- NOT limited to KDE. by roard · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well, if they create webservices for wikipedia/wiktionary, everybody will be able to use it, not just KDE ... I don't see what will prevent me to write a GNUstep client for example :-)

  6. Bandwidth by slapout · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So, on one hand Wikipedia needs more bandwidth ( http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/10/235520 2 )...

    And on the other, they are doing things like this that will increase the load on their servers...

    (Then again, I never understood why people mow their lawns and then water them. :-)

    --
    Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
  7. Re:Trillian does this. by pherthyl · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm not entirely convinved of the usefulness of this feature.. I tried it once and thought it was ultimately useless. Much better would be just to have a context menu with a "Look up in Wikipedia" entry for any word.

    How often do you really need to look up a word in an IM conversation? All this feature does is place useless load on the wikipedia servers because people are bored and are mousing over the links to look at definitions for mundane words.

  8. Re:Amarok? by ThinkTiM · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, browsers are getting old. What we need is a program that you can open, and look at information from a variety of differented sources - perhaps they should even have some way of maintaining lists of your favourite sources. And they should invent somekind of markup language so that the information soures can structure their content so that the program knows how to present it. oh wait....

  9. Re:amarok-1.3.1-beta1 compilation fails by WWWWolf · · Score: 2, Insightful

    For the sake of everything that is good and holy, let aRts die already. Nuke it. Nuke it without mercy. Let no bit stand atop another. Walk now amongst the ruins of the evil hack as the new Scourge of God. Drive now the thrice-cursed band-aid solutions to cheap hardware problems from our sight, nay, from the sights of every man, woman and child in this world.

    And compile --without-arts or whatever it's called in amaroK.

    Or just do what everyone else does and wait for 1.3 final, but even there, disabling aRts is definitely the way to go. GStreamer all the way! =)