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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."
they better not name it Kikipedia, or Wikide.
I hope other projects such as the Gnome project jump on this ship as well.
The plan WAS to get all these linux penguins playing tag, but they never quite got started. The rules consulted on Wikipedia.org were changed from moment to moment.
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 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?
I use Trillian as an IM client and it does something similar to this. I get underlined links with more information from Wikimedia if words in the message match an existing wiki topic. I think it is pretty cool.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
"Earl Grey tea is a black tea blend, which gets a distinctive flavour and aroma from bergamot oil..."
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?!'"
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."
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!
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
I would think this new Wikipedia extension would be implemented as a KIOSlave. So it wouldn't matter which KDE group implemented it, all KDE programs would have access to the functionality.
Je ne parle pas francais.
Excellent point. I'm not a KDE user, but this is an awesome idea.
/me gets started on the Rhythmbox patches.
This is a great idea! It's going to help technical application like RKWard (http://rkward.sourceforge.net/, a GUI for the R statistical language: http://r-project.org/), integrate informations from wikipedia. In the field of statistics, help is a big issue. It's quite difficult for F/OSS to compete with SAS or SPSS. KDE/Wikipedia is certainly the way to go to fill the gap.
Yup, that's basically what amaroK seem to do.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"/me gets started on the Rhythmbox patches."
Then quickly discovers it already does this using Allmusic
> Wouldn't it be a better use of resources to incorporate this into a browser or word processor?
AbiWord has already done for some time.
> I already know who sang the song - they're my legal copies
Yes, but this isn't about looking up the song somehow to see who sang it (try MusicBrainz for that). It's about looking up the band to read about their history or other news. (Wikipedia does have articles on a surprising number of bands.) And nothing says that amaroK (not Amarock) would insist on popping up a Konqueror window with the results from every new song -- lots of features can be disabled as a preference, or not even compiled in in the first place. (In the same way that you'd only want your word processor to do this with words you highlight instead of *every* word you type.)
And of course there's already a list of other KDE stuff that could integrate this to benefit from information that's already been collected, instead of duplicating information on stars and chemical elements and countries (for instance).
So it's *already* been incorporated into a browser *and* word processor (there's a search plugin for Firefox); why not add it to amaroK and Kalzium and KStars and.... ?
/me compiled the Amarok beta earlier today.
:-)
It doesn't do the Wikipedia lookup unless you ask it to - normal operation is the same as ever. It works very nicely
Since when did Wikipedia stop being an encyclopedia and became a directory for music lyrics and reviews?
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
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.
Amarok already do much of this. When I listen to an album, you will see the albumart, you can read the lyrics, other albums by that artist on your system. About the only thing that is missing is the reviews and discography....
Je ne parle pas francais.
Now wikipedia can also become overcomplicated and sluggish with background services nobody needs!
kidding... though I'm an xfce fan myself
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
I suppose that Microsoft will copy this idea by linking their desktop services with Encarta.
Indeed, I would be very hesistant to trust their results. While Wikipedia's veracity has often been questioned, at least it is a public effort with the input of hundreds of thousands of people. Encarta, on the other hand, is a corporate effort without the public involvement. The risk of corporate nogoodery is far greater.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Apparently the latest version of Trillian will highlight words with links to their definition in Wikipedia. So as you chat with your friends, you become a living breathing dictionary. That's a rather nice feature for IM conversations.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
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 :-)
As it is, amaroK comes by default with a tag to pull up lyrics for songs. It's very nicely integrated, and convenient. Given my preference for obscure indie bands, I've been doing a lot of submitting - again through that same interface. Point is, the developer(s) of amaroK have certainly noticed the KDE project's emphasis on integration, and they've got their thinking caps on.
Now what I'd like to see is blog/journal integration with contacts. KDE's use of the standard address book for mail and IM is a good start; let's get to the point where the contacts themselves are the focus, and any given way to communicate a few clicks from the contact. KMail and Kopete parts can make it happen.
I have cobuyitaphobia you insensitive clod!
Get your Unix fortune now!
Though it's still only alpha or beta quality it does does a WikiPedia-lookup plugin that works rather well.
l uginMatrix
http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/P
the whole wiki will probably be repalced by "FR1ST PS0T"
/. story being posted, user 198.64.22.167 replaced all the content with the words "GNAA Fails It". The article was reverted within 3 minutes by registered user Get It.
Close.
A look at the article's history shows that within about 15 minutes of this
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
I use them every day, Kencylopedia would also be handy.
Deleted
amarok (kde music player) already does this, and it gets lyrics automatically too.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a freaking "big bag of web-accessible content". Wiktionary is a freaking dictionary not a 'big bag of langauage factoids'. Etc. Adding a page on some band and having the music player display it is fine, but is sounds like KDE is figuring on putting their freakin' user manuals on wikipedia and adding geeky meta-data to pages. That's just crap.
It wouldn't bother me except the KDE people seem to suffer from Microsoft's disease, aka a near-total lack of good taste; it's not like KDE isn't 10x more featureful and capable than gnome, it's that it's just gross... it looks like it was designed by multiple geekoids battling each other for maximum dweebiness. Or something like that. I just don't want them to do that to wikipedia, which is cool as hell as-is.
What's so inconvenient about using a browser?
Tom: Have ever heard any Dream Theater? (At this point,I hover my cursor over the highlighted phrase and it displays the first few paragraphs of the wikipedia article in a tooltip)
Matt: Yeah, prog rock right? I borrowed their Train of Thought album once.
Much quicker than switching to Firefox and searching Wikipedia.
can be found here.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Amarok is media player, but the clue here assumingly is that amarok is able to show albumcovers for albums, which it fetches from amazon.com. Some lisencing (or something similar) issue forces the Amarok to remove/re-fetch album covers that is has downloaded every 90 days or so, moving to use wikipedia for this propably eases the pain on this detail.
Also lyrics are fetched from some service in the Internet, but I can quess that providing extra information about the band, composer etc. might later on appear after this do-operation deepens.
emerge kde
(not quite graphical, but pretty easy; it does take a couple days, though...)
"Since when did Wikipedia stop being an encyclopedia and became a directory for music lyrics and reviews?"
Wiki knows all.. Quiet down before it finds out what a jerk you can be.
Laugh, its a joke and its Friday. (It is here anyway)
1) Open the minicli window in KDE (Alt+F2)
:)
2) Type in 'wp <term to look up>'
3) Prof-- err, Kencyclopedia!
You're welcome.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
KDE creates front-end to access Wikipedia Content.
Who says you won't be able to use this under programs in GNOME? Windows?
Where does it say that they will change wikipedia to fit in with KDE design? Nowhere? All right.
Your wikipedia experience will stay the same and there will be advanced features available for those who want it. Capice?
Just out of interest, what are these childish reasons? If it's not wanting to depend on libquicktime I can understand it since it's quite a big library, the best thing to do would be to have the configure script detect it and compile or not compile m4a support as appropriate.
I am trolling
What's so inconvenient about using a browser?
In general, nothing.
But browsers are big and fat. (Yes, even FF.) They have to handle Javascript, SSL, plugins & any and all sorts of horendous MS-generated shit-HTML.
A purpose-built Wikipedia viewer will/should be fast, small and not subject to any security breaches.
It's the same basic reason why I use GAIM instead of firing up Mozilla and going to http://chat.yahoo.com./
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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....
Now what would be cool is to translae the KDE documentation translated into the Wikmedia format. That would be really kick ass. I have always taught thatWiki is the ideal documentation tool, by it's dynamic nature, you could add topics, correct documentation, add examples Etc. à la PHP doc for instance or Faq-o-Matic. Linuxdoc can also profit from this, although I believe it's largly dead ?? by now.
I can't believe no one has pointed out the blindingly obvious GNOME counterpart--Gikipedia. "Geeky-pedia."
The marketing practically writes itself.
Media Wiki is a PHP/MySQL project, not a Perl/MySQL project.
.\.\att Clare
Well I don't know what to think at this point. As part of google's SoC i basicaly suggested something similar to kde. I'm left wondering if this has been in the works or if they "took" the idea from me?
Wonderfull way to encourage me to code open source.
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
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
(well, okay, it just puts the emerge output in a window, but porthole is a GUI program)
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Look at the screen shot in the dot.kde.org article to see how it works in amaroK. Knowledge is another KDE project that will act as a frontend to Wikipedia.
They were removed just to give a more clean interface. There's an icon to open the page in a web browser if you want to edit. amaroK is a media player, we wanted to avoid turning it into a full-blown web browser. :)
It already has. Just use one of the numerous distributions that have graphical installs.
I'm guessing there's some sort of binary incompatibilty. Add --without-arts to the ./configure.
Well, big and fat browsers are indeed big and fat. But what about lightweight browsers like Dillo?
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.
It also has uses outside of the song area. For instance, the KStars project wants to export/reference information from Wikipedia. There is an element table app that can do the same thing. There may even be an encyclopedia app that comes out of this. Something like encarta/etc, but on Linux.
Who says having a brain means you have to use it? Nobody? You're okay then.
They don't say they are going to add f'ed up metadata to wikipedia? Can't happen then. They didn't say it.
They didn't say my wikipedia experience will change? Can't change then. They didn't say it would change, so it won't.
Never mind what I do, only what I say. Don't be concerned over the results, only the intentions. That's kind of a f'ed up mentality. Now give me my -1 for responding to flamebait.
Sure. It's feature-laden. If you want, you can even call it bloated. And it's interface needs help. Remember though: if you don't like the way KDE does things, you always have the ability to join the project and fix it. The same goes for wikipedia. Bitching about it on /. helps noone.
If you have used both applications, you will immediately know that amaroK is definitely *not* iTunes. Superficially, they do appear similar. However, the way they act is not the same. amaroK... makes more sense. You have to use it to understand. (Heh... sorta like some illicit substances, I hear).
It'd be nice if Wikipedia provided lighter versions of their pages, so that they didn't look like shit in Dillo.
'Cause it's pretty damn hard to read right now.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Here's the real one: http://bugs.kde.org
I guess that's what I get for posting in haste.
This got me thinking about how how the semantic web could all fit together to achieve this and similar tasks. There could be a number of components:
Client applications, graphing is just one possibility. Spreadsheets filled with data from the web, or even a garden design programs pulling data about different sorts of plants.
Servers, lots of these about with all sort of cool data, world facts, government statistics, performance of super computers.
Semantic Search Engine: say you want to graph world population, it could be possible to build a search engine which could list available semantic info from all the different sources out there. For example you could type in "Countries:Population", giving URLs of all the web services which contain information on the populations of countries.
Repository of screen-scrapers. Over the years I've written a number of small scripts to pull data out of a number of different HTML web pages. Why not share these? This might be a quicker method to semanticise the web rather than wait for servers to publish their sites in XML.
Pull these together with some appropriate standards and imagine the possibilities. Homework assignments in geography, chemistry or any subject with quantative data could be a breeze.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
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
and what exactly is stopping you from downloading? ok theres no torrents but still. im sure they will serve torrents too if the need would arise.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
to share articles over a P2P protocol. Right now it is just an app that stores content offline. With proper checksumming, it could change the way the content is delivered and reduce Wikipedia's bandwidth bill significantly.
This is already available here: http://download.wikimedia.org/ I heard there are plans to release a printed edition and other formats
Kiki Dee?
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
http://oooconv.free.fr/wikipedia/wikipedia_en.html
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
http://oooconv.free.fr/wikipedia/
OOoConv's OOoWikipedia plugin...
Put identity in the browser.
Knowledge is in development. It's a KDE-based offline encyclopedia application for wikipedia.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
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! =)
Everything about KDE is already so kramped and unkonventional as it is. I don't see why they would want to overkrowd their menus, windows, applications , etc. even more... Despite it's more polished look than Gnome (which is of course up for argument), it's ruining the user experience by not keeping things simple.
Pay no attention to what the critics say. Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic! - Jean Sibelius
...until someone goatse trolls it and you "man ls" just as your boss walks in :o(
I am NaN
You're mean. You're destroying people's prejudice that KDE can only add features and bloat.
Good decision, BTW.
Actually, from what I understand it's the kde-education package that will probably see the most use from this.
In particular applications like KStars - possibly one of KDE's best (and least publicised) applications.
Clicking on a star or galaxy and getting the information from Wikipedia from it would be brilliant.
Advanced users are users too!