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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."
the whole wiki will probably be repalced by "FR1ST PS0T"
This is nice and all, but when will KDE have a graphical install? It would seem that the developers have more pressing problems, like making KDE easy to install.
KDE (K Desktop Environment) is a free desktop environment and development platform built with Trolltech's Qt toolkit. It runs on most Unix and Unix-like systems, such as Linux, BSD and Solaris.
It is famous for being extremely slow, bloated and for relying on the now depreciated X11 Windowing system as well as other legacy technologies.
It has been heavily criticized by all but the most undescerning, that it is little more than a sad copy of Windows 95-98.
Experts predict that by 2020 CPUS will be just about powerful enough to run today's KDE at speeds similar to other GUIS for competing operating systems. However others feel it is simply a lost cause.
Wikipedia is (just!) a user interface through which "anyone can edit" most of the GFDL text corpus. However it has serious problems, most of them due to being
1. based on MediaWiki which is in turn based on MySQL only,
2. governed by morons
3. inventing its own wikitext standard day by day to deal with its format problems in dozens of languages.
The GFDL Text Corpus is a vast volume of over half a million articles that have received at least some well-intended editorial attention at Wikipedia and other MediaWiki based services like SourceWatch, Metaweb and Consumerium. (There are also non-GFDL MediaWiki services like Wikitravel which are not part of this corpus but part of the CC-by-sa text corpus, which can be handled on similar terms but not mixed with texts licensed under GFDL).
The fact that the GFDL corpus includes many articles on many topics in dozens of languages authored by thousands of users, much more diversity brought to much higher standards of uniformity than any other set of wikis, suggests that no wikitext standard dare be based on anything but the Wikipedia conventions.
As these settle down, it should be possible for a real standard to emerge, be supported as a MoinMoin parser, and suck the entire GFDL text corpus into PythonSpace, so that real coders can work on it RESTfully, using meaningful HTTP events that can do transactions that dig deeply into the text. Thus routing around bad governance and bad MediaWiki perl code and bad MySQL database.
Experiments in RESTful protocols would be drastically simplified by having a syntactically disciplined corpus all under a single license that was nonetheless representative of a vast range of topics and languages - and HTTP events could be defined that reflected wiki implementation features like the watchlist, with a high degree of certainty that it would work ALMOST as well as the existing ciontent managemeny features of only one wiki. Effectively, distributing management of the text corpus using a REST protocol, routing around Wikipedia itself, and permitting arbitrary text processing on the articles. Which thousands of people are editing and willing to edit. This is the ultimate test base for REST projects!