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Wikimedia and KDE Cooperation Announced
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."
What about "KWikipedia." That's kind of catchy, actually.
Finally! This is something I've been preaching for a long time.
While I understand it isn't (directly) the goal of open-source to compete with Company, Inc., the next generation of computing tools is going to be heavily service-oriented. That is to say: open-source has thus far concentrated on making software "products" -- applications, utilities, libraries, and so on. In a service-oriented community, though, open content is just as important as the tools that use it.
Furthermore, I like to see when open-source products doing a little more -- wait for it -- synergy. (Shoot me.) Thus far, open projects have, apart from sharing code and libraries, stayed mostly to themselves. But partnerships like this are absolutely beneficial to creating a cohesive, seamless user experience. Via services, you create an entire open "platform" that isn't just the tools, but the content that backs it up. It also creates an entirely new market for companies to support open-source software.
I've looked at a bunch of different ways of playing and organizing my small mp3 collection (is 20GB still small?). Amarok has been one of my favorite aps when I'm using my linux desktop. When I've set up my file server to stream mp3s over the web to my office computer (running Windows), I've used Jinzora.
Now, both of these programs use a MySQL database backend to help organize and catagorize mp3s, and use id3 tag information. I think it'd be an absolute joy to have them share the same data, instead of using two redundant databases. Perhaps as this project matures, we could see this become a standardized format for multiple projects to use, so the information can be shared and edited more easily.
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
well, wiki is a big bag of web-accessible content that could fit nicely into desktop applications... personally i would like to be listening to a cd on my computer, say "here come the warm jets" by brian eno, and be able to pull up a short bio on mr. eno, his complete discography, the lyrics to the current song, a list of reviews of the album and artist and the cover art for the album... all without having to fire up my web browser and performing a bunch of search-n-clicks.
2 1337 4 u!
I actually started building a wiki for a CS class with this goal in mind. Rather than a traditional HTML wiki, it was built around RDF data. So not only was it able to dump the data in a machine-readable format, it also had a built-in RDQL query engine that worked over http.
To conform to the data model, I had to impose restrictions on the input, but the final product is a lot more reliable than screen-scraping HTML, which is something I hope the kde/wikipedia people avoid in this project.
Badass Resumes
I hope GNOME and the folks in Redmond follow this lead and create a Wikipedia desktop app to interact with this webservice.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
I want to be able to download Wikipedia. Obviously this would rape the Wikipedia servers but they could do a monthly release via bit torrent. I think this would be really useful and they could even sell copies of it on DVD.
To some extent I like the right click producing 'What is this?' in Windows.
I think it could be useful to have a simlar function available in other desktop enviroments. Perhaps this right click 'what is this?' could draw up information from a wiki source.
I think that could be very useful for configuration applications in particular.
What if KDE's own manuals and help system were rsynced with its original data in wikipedia? What if all manuals were rsynced from wikis?
We could type 'man ls' and get the latest page with comments and all.
Sure beats submitting manpage patches to developers.
Even better, like in wikipedia, you'd click on a word in a manual page, and you'd get the man page of that manual and all related pages...
Now combine that with the google search engine.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky