Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-07-30/Technology report

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• Thanks for focusing on Nischay Nahata's Google Summer of Code project; I think it's going to be very helpful for Semantic MediaWiki in a variety of ways. A few points of correction: "Semantic MediaWiki" is both an individual extension and the name given to the group of extensions that make use of it; SMW is in fact in use on one Wikimedia wiki, Wikimedia Labs (that counts, right?); I don't think academia makes for any significant portion of SMW's usage; and I don't think anyone with any serious knowledge of the matter would call SMW and Wikidata competitors: SMW is intended for single-language wikis, while Wikidata (or more accurately, the software it will run on, Wikibase) is intended for massively multilingual wikis like Wikipedia. You could argue that wikis with a few languages could use either system, but I would hardly say that makes the two competitors. Yaron K. (talk) 14:57, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Personally I consider labs to be an "internal" thing and not a "project" (in the sense of an open wiki for collaboration on writing down the sum of human knowladge, yadda). However I could see an argument both ways on that. translatewiki also uses SMW, and well it is separate from Wikimedia, it is highly integrated with our (non-english) projects. Bawolff (talk) 17:20, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

• • Thank you as ever for the corrections, Yaron, I do struggle to report with the same contextual depth on SMW as vanilla MW, especially in summary format. The competitors reference is to a thread last month on wikidata-l (I deliberately shan't link to it) in which one SMW advocate accused Wikidata of "rewriting SMW (and various of its extensions) almost from scratch" etc., etc. It's a hugely complex issue, especially since Wikidata phase 2 isn't fixed itself yet. I shall try to give a better researched (and longer) overview in the future, I promise :) . - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 19:21, 1 August 2012 (UTC) (n.b. just in case it's confusing, the claims in question were later removed, not by me)

Thanks for responding, and for clarifying. I didn't know we were allowed to change the articles themselves... :) I mean, it's a wiki, but that's still a little unexpected. I also didn't know about that wikidata-l thread - I'm not on that mailing list. I just looked it up, and now I have to reiterate what I said about "anyone with any serious knowledge of the matter". :) Anyway, it's still good to see SMW being mentioned, and you (or anyone else) are always free to write to the semediawiki-user mailing list if you want quick feedback on anything. Yaron K. (talk) 04:30, 2 August 2012 (UTC)