Submissions/Wikimedia Germany's Software and Infrastructure Projects

This is an open submission for Wikimania 2010.

Title of the submission: Wikimedia Germany's Software and Infrastructure Projects

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation): presentation

Author of the submission: Daniel Kinzler

E-mail address or username (if username, please confirm email address in Special:Preferences): User:Daniel Kinzler (WMDE)

Country of origin: Germany

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.): Wikimedia Deutschland

Personal homepage or blog: http://brightbyte.de

Abstract (please use no less than 300 words to describe your proposal): In this presentation, I will outline the ongoing on future projects Wikimedia Germany is planning in the area of software and infrastructure. This covers improvements of MediaWiki as well as research projects and the toolserver. Some of projects covered are:

Growing the Toolserver: From a community toolbox to a full blown research plattform. We plan to include access statistics for every wiki page on the toolserver, making it possible for tools to easily list the x most popular pages in a given category, etc. Later, we want to provide efficient access to article text from the toolserver, something that could prove very useful to many kinds of research.
Supporting TIFF images in MediaWiki: subtle challenges of a seemingly simple project. This project became a showcase to use for issues with automated testing, use of external programs, localization, and other aspects of extension development.
CatScan: recursive category search and intersection. By keeping the category structure of all wikis in memory, it can search very efficiently. We plan to implement this as a standalone service, which can be used from the toolserver as well as being integrated with the regular search engine.
WikiWord: building a thesaurus from Wikipedia. Such a thesaurus can be used as a basis for research as well as for the implementation of “real world” services, such as WikiPics.
WikiPics: multilingual image search for commons. The information from links in Wikipedia can be used to find images on commons, using any language.
External Data: integrating data from external resources in Wikipedia. The first we aim at is bibliographical data, so citing the same book on different pages no longer requires used to enter all the bibliographic information again and again.
Structured data: extracting data infoboxes and using it. Wikipedia is full of structured data, and there are many applications eager to use it - this is shown by the success of dbpedia. Integrating this kind of data extraction into the wiki itself should prove very useful for a lot of applications.

We hope to attract attention, comments and help for some of the projects, as well as to coordinate our efforts with other chapters. While the foundation is strongly focusing on user interface issues lately, we want to look at the data and structure in the wiki projects. Getting data in and out more easily will further the spread of free knowledge.

Track (People and Community/Knowledge and Collaboration/Infrastructure): Infrastructure

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: probably

Slides or further information (optional)

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