Proposal:Wikimedia editor

The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

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Achieve continued growth in readership
Focus on quality content
Increase Participation
Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
Encourage Innovation

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Summary

Build a general-purpose client-side program for handling wikis and other relevant sites.

Proposal

Features of the program

P2P synchronization system.
Standardize API for other online and offline software.
WYSIWYG editor. It should be possible to make a page in WYSIWYG manner, after which the program would send images to the Commons and text to the appropriate wiki. WYSIWYG editor is, also, another project needed for a long time.
Gathering external content, connecting it locally to the appropriate [Wikipedia] pages.
Interfacing with media repositories, like Flickr, Google Picasa, YouTube etc. If licensed appropriately (see below), it would be possible to upload Flickr image to Wikimedia Commons.
Interfacing with other free software CMS and CMS-like engines, like Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress and Gnuforge are.
Categorization tool: If someone edits a Wikipedia page locally and categorizes it locally, that editor should be able to make distinction between local and global (=Wikipedia) categories.
System of notes for local and public content.
Address book system with connections to the most important address book systems (locally, let's say, Thunderbird, MS Outlook etc.; LDAP, Gmail, Yahoo etc. via network or Internet).
Chatting system based on XMPP protocol. Probably, client-only system is needed.
License handling. For example, if one image on Flickr is licensed under some of the CC-NC-* licenses, program would block sending such image on Commons. If some site doesn't have license information, program may [semi-]automatically send OTRS request.
Handling Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites should be as easy as software updates are: Everyone would be able to synchronize their content locally.
Possibility to share knowledge in client-to-client way (in opposition to the present client-to-server-to-client way)
Distributed version control as storage mechanism to do proper mergers like http://selenic.com/mercurial
Animated page histories
Readability statistics (Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease and Grade Level scores)
(... add your feature above this line)

Motivation

Many of us want to have a program which would collect our [personal] knowledge in one program. By using one program for editing Wikipedia (and other sites), collecting other sources and putting personal notes at relevant places, contributing to Wikipedia and expanding and archiving own knowledge would be more efficient.
Users would have better licensing options.
Backups of Wikimedia content would be distributed.
Easier handling of Wikimedia content.
More effective data handling.
Creation of distributed knowledge-sharing system.
Wikimedia editor may become the core program for scientific work, which means that we would be able to attract more scientists as volunteers.
...

Key Questions

does the API at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Changing_wiki_content provide sufficient access to wikipedia, such that a wikimedia editor that meets the requirements as outlined in this proposal can be created as a third party application in its own right, i.e. without any modifications to existing wikipedia services or infrastructure? Lkcl 14:48, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, the API is mature enough to handle the user actions. The difficulties wouldn't be on the communicating with Wikimedia side. Platonides 14:58, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

(to be added)

Potential Costs

At least in-house team for handling the core program development for at least two years. Development of the program would be similar to the development of MediaWiki.

References

Notes

Options related to the software building
- it may be designed as an add-on of Google Wave client;
- even better, it may be a separate Google Wave client;
- efforts may be shared with some existing free software project which partially covers features of this program;
- it may be based on separate protocol, while it is better then to incorporate into the Google Wave Federation protocol.
Client-side assumes MediaWiki side as client-side (like web mail is client side for email servers).

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal Talk:Wikimedia editor.

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