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Proposal talk:Interoperability (Wiki-to-Wiki interoperability)

From Strategic Planning

Better searching, what data

If you want to search only Wikipedia,

  • Firefox already comes with a Wikipedia search in its drop-down
  • add site:en.wikipedia.org to your searches,
  • use a bookmarklet or keyword to jump direct to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s

A federated search of multiple wiki sites might be useful, but that's something search engines could and should provide; you tell it to favor sites running MediaWiki and/or a specific list of sites.

Pulling information from multiple wikis is tricky. The interwiki prefix table is implicitly a set of trusted wikis, but their page names don't match, won't match, and shouldn't match. Searching for "Spock" happens to go to the Star Trek character's page, but it could well go to a disambiguation page for him and Dr. Benjamin Spock. A domain-specific wiki can have a title like "First novel" or "McCoy" that corresponds to a different title in a more general wiki.

Your 1-click export-import of data raises the question of what data gets exported. If you're looking at the contents of infoboxes, then there are research projects that already crawl wikipedia pages deriving facts from them, see en:DBpedia.

-- Skierpage 01:45, 14 August 2009 (UTC)Reply

What I propose is a site similar to google that crawls all sorts of Wikis and can use a sort of PageRank system like google does to order by relevancy. The thing is, even with the Firefox add-in, I personally do not know all of the different wiki sites I may want to search. I find I have better luck searching Wikis than using google if I want just general information on a subject. If there was a search engine that only searched Wikis, I feel I'd have an easier time finding what I seek. For example, I did a google search earlier this morning for "Outlook 2007 encrypted email key grant permissions" to solve an issue I was having with Outlook prompting for a password for an encryption certificate. At first I received a bunch of software download links ect from Google, but when I went to "Show Options" and selected "Forums", I received many more results of other users having similar issues. I am looking for a feature similar to that where I can cut out all of the shareware and e-commerce sites from searches where I want information on a subject. I don't see how the options you propose can solve that issue since they only work on Wikipedia.
As far as the 1-click import export, I am looking for the contents of a page. For example, I tried copying w:Template:Navbox from Wikipedia to another Wiki and the export missed all of the < and > from the XML and so the code didn't work when I imported it. I would like to bypass the user as a middleman to a transfer.--TParis00ap 02:57, 14 August 2009 (UTC)Reply

How is this not already done?

How do existing http interfaces to Foundation content not implement this? All of the major search engines index most all Foundation content, and the MediaWiki wikitext is, as far as I know, uniform across all sister projects and Wikia. Translating wikitext to and from other wiki software is not a very difficult problem, usually. If you can use curl or wget then you can download and upload interoperable content in your programs, in general. Is there something I'm missing? 99.25.114.234 21:18, 14 August 2009 (UTC)Reply

Curl requires knowledge in Perl or PHP to use. As far as searches go, the major search engines do not search Wiki sites exclusively. I'd like to see a search engine that covers many different sites using Wiki software exclusively. That way I do not have to filter through all the forums, e-commerce, and myspace pages to find what I want to read about.--TParis00ap 03:16, 15 August 2009 (UTC)Reply

Proposal:Distributed_Wikipedia back-end API would kinda help here

take a look at the rough outline of the back-end API. there's nothing to stop people creating stand-alone node services which just do "search", submitting DHT queries for keywords in wikipedia pages. in fact, that should be actively encouraged. hmmmm.... Lkcl 21:38, 1 October 2009 (UTC)Reply

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 00:11, 3 September 2009 (UTC)Reply