Wikipedia4 (proposal)
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The project to separate the Wikipedia3 code from the Wikipedia project and servers and sysops is incomplete. Therefore it is premature to discuss any details of Wikipedia4 - but necessary to outline what it should achieve. Note that future releases, e.g.Wikipedia5 will also be constrained by these choices.
Key questions about wikipedia4 (please put sub-questions and answers after each, rather than clustering them together at the end of the file out of context, i.e. keep this file in time/issue/position/argument/evidence/source/authority form as much as you can) include at least these issues (all should be resolved before end of 2003, but not before Wikipedia3 is in use on some sites independent of wikipedia.org itself, thus they have one deadline in time):
- new name? new support site? and so on
- email notification option as a subset within watchlist
- which of the en:Wikipedia:Self-references should be encouraged, or discouraged? (presumably, ones that are invalid should simply be removed)
- does it still have any dependencies on hard-coded servers, sysops, or domains? Or are these removed entirely in Wikipedia3?
- what time frame should it aim for release?
- how compatible need it be with wikipedia3?
- implement Wikitax? is it ready for prime time?
- what ideology should guide syntax/XML DTD changes?
- what uses, other than Wikipedia and Wiktionary, must it support?
- how much of a priority is optimizing for performance - or is this a hardware problem?
- what minimal hardware requirements to assume?
- What about database? still sql?
- memcacheD support? http://www.danga.com/memcached/
- what features are unreasonable and must be deferred to Wikipedia5?
For more detailed development issues, edit the Wikipedia4 timeline so as to reflect the choices that must be made or constraints that must be respected in development. If a question is open, please leave it here. Ideally the board would make all these decisions, but they aren't recruited yet.
See MediaWiki roadmap.
Suggestions
edit- For animals, plants, and other biological organisms, their articles should include taxonomic information for searches.
- The ability for the wiki to automaticly create pages ob years and dates, much the same as the automatic categorisation. This would probably be quite difficult, if not impossible.
- I was thinking further on this, and I thought of a way that it could be implemented. Just as you can allocate certain pages to the letter of your choice when categorising, e.g.
[[Category:Republicans|Bush, George]]
in wikipedia 4 you could add the ability to do this for dates, e.g.
- [[15 May|birth]]
- [[29 June|death]]
- [[1776|foundation]]
and so on.
This would probably be fairly tricky to code, but I think it would be a huge improvement in Wikimedia, as it will mean people who make an effort to fill in the pages for dates would have their work cut out. Of course there would be the problem of people entering dates and not entering any information of how they should be indexed. To solve this there could be a section on the bottom of the page for entries with no information. Also I just realised that coding like this [[15 May|birth]] would mask the date as birth, so maybe something else could be used like: [[15 May!birth]]. I would be interested to hear what any developers think of this idea, you can reach me here David