I'm at the Wikimania hacking days today. We drove down from Montreal through Vermont and New Hampshire on Monday, stopping overnight in the beautiful town of Lincoln (New Hampshire) in the White Mountains. Amita June had a crappy ride on Monday -- she was unhappy and uncomfortable and let us know it at every possible opportunity. We stopped in Saint Johnsbury, VT for dinner, and she got some time to walk around and play, but beside that she was crabby.
Tuesday morning was much better -- she had a big bagel from the Comfort Inn's breakfast buffet, and her Sleepy Bear teddy bear, and she was happy. Sleepy Bear is winning the war for hearts and minds in our house -- it's the bear that she's starting to sleep with more and more, and she makes a happy squeal when she sees it. This could be good or bad news.
Anyways, we made it down to Cambridge (Massachusetts) aaaalmost in time for the beginning of Hacking Days. HD is the technical pre-conference for the more sociological and content-oriented Wikimania. I thought it was going to be mostly MW committers and Wikimedia sysadmins, but it's turned out to be huge. I think there are about 40-50 people here -- a just gigantic group.
Anyways, I was sitting in the One Laptop Per Child office meeting room with about 30 hackers yesterday morning. I was about 20 minutes late, but I managed to find a seat anyways. Everyone was giving introductions, and up stand David Recordon, Jonathan Daugherty, and David Strauss, all of whom say they're there to help me with the OpenID MediaWiki extension.
As everyone's talking, I realize Ward Cunningham is sitting right in front of me. The guy sitting next to me stands up to introduce himself, and says, "I'm Dan Bricklin, who many of you may know as the inventor of the spreadsheet..."
Jeez.
Anyways, the talk has been fast and furious. Yesterday was a long discussion about the state of Wikimedia servers, the upshot of which, for me, was: Holy Shit, Wikimedia is a big project. I managed to talk to a ton of people, including Travis Derouin of wikiHow, Jason from Wikia, all the OpenID folks, etc. etc. Jonathan Daugherty and I actually got some hacking done, which was great.
tags: wikimedia wikimania wiki ward cunningham dan bricklin wikipedia hacking days
The future of MediaWiki
This morning Brion Vibber and Tim Starling gave a discussion about the future of MediaWiki. The story? More cool features, I think. The OpenID will be part of it; incorporating a WYSIWYG editor like WikiWyg or FCKEditor into the software. Also, more AJAX-y features, which are coming up through the codebase right now.
I think in a large way MW's future is going to be outside of Wikipedia proper. Some of the cooler developments using the MW as a platform include WiktionaryZ and Semantic MediaWiki, both of which provide a structured data substrate to wiki pages. They're not compatible, which I think is something that needs to happen at some point in the future, but they're very promising for future projects.
Another big class of projects is bots -- like PyWikipediabot or some of the "vandal fighting" bots and interfaces, e.g. Tawkerbot. I think that MediaWiki is drifting from being a monolithic browser app more into a Web-based service, which will be really productive from a content-production and -maintenance point of view, but which is extremely challenging from the social point of view.
Finally, I think the great explosion in the world of customized MW extensions and skins is meaning a real marketplace for expanding the software is happening. I think this is pretty fabu, also. Some people have been discussing formalizing this ecology into a CPAN or JabberStudio-style site for hosting and organizing MW extensions. We'll see what happens with that, but if it comes around, I hope that it's named $wgForge.
Maj and Amita June are running around Boston today... very slowly and carefully. They've got a brutal heat wave on here, and people are fainting and collapsing like wilting flowers. I think they're going to go places that have air conditioning, like museums and so forth.
tags: mediawiki future $wgForge boston heat wave bots wysiwyg