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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.
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.
> 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.... ?