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Proposal:Separate content from style

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  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation


Summary

Today we have one application (Mediawiki) doing two distintict tasks:

  • manage the database (the content)
  • translate (render) the database information into an html page (the style)

but I think that it's better if these two tasks will be separated.

Proposal

  • One application that manage the database with API via web (get an article, modify an article, ...)
    mw:API?
  • A lot of different applications to display (and to edit) articles. These software will work on the web but also locally.

Example:

                               web
  User <--> local application <---> core application <--> database
                               API

 User to local application: "I want the article New_York_City"
 local application to core application: "Give me the page "New_York_City", I'm User, my password is ... "
 core application to database: "SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE ..."
 core application: "User has privileges to read "New_York_City" "
 core application to local application: "<article name="New_York_City">'''New York city''' is a [[city]] ...</article>"
 local application to user render the xml to a nice text (for example, but not necessary, an html page)
 

the local software can also be a web application.

Motivation

We need to switch to third millenium... mediawiki is too old. If we have api we can develop a lot of "local software", and not only one.

Look at wikipedia:OpenStreetMap openstreetmap internal structure: [1]. Do you see? One database, one api interface, and a lot of applications to visualize and to edit maps.

We can do applications that do something different from read/write, for example we can develop applications that do statistics, automatic edits, ...

Key Questions

Potential Costs

Good programmers.


References

Community Discussion

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