Working With MediaWiki

considered, the best wiki software at the moment. I hope that the book adequately explains core MediaWiki, outside of any extensions. And I also hope that, for those of you who aren’t using Semantic MediaWiki and its related extensions, this book made a strong case for their use.
    There’s an interesting property of semantic wikis, which is that, once you’ve used them a few times, systems that aren’t semantic wikis start to get annoying. This has happened to me, and I’ve heard of the effect from others. The limitations of other systems start to become apparent: for regular data systems, the most important is the lack of a version history, while for non-semantic wikis, it’s the lack of any way to summarize or aggregate all the data contained in the wiki’s pages, or to impose a structure on pages.
    Regular data systems’ lack of a version history means, most importantly, that access has to be tightly controlled: either only a few people can edit any of the data, or each specific set of data is restricted to some small group, with the entire set of permissions settable through some monstrous administrative interface. But it also means that the provenance of data tends to be unknown: if you see a field on the screen, you usually don’t know who put it there, or when it was set, which can cause problems.
    Of course, there are workarounds that can be done: you can have a “Notes” field, where everyone who edits the data is meant to summarize their changes, and maybe put in the date; but this is a hack, and any such protocol might not be followed, and even if it, it’s never quite as informative as actually seeing all the changes.
    But there’s also the issue of the flexibility of data structures. In a semantic wiki, if you want to add a new field to a page, or remove a field, it’s just a matter of adding or removing a few lines from some wiki pages, and possibly creating a new semantic property. The total time spent could be as little as five minutes. In a non-wiki system, it depends on the setup: creating or removing a field can possibly be done easily, or it might take a significant amount of work, requiring a programmer to re-code some part of the program, a database administrator to apply the necessary changes in the database, and then some QA team to make sure that the changes didn’t break anything. Or, if you’re using an off-the-shelf system, such a change might not be possible at all.
    Non-semantic wikis have all that flexibility as well, but again, they don’t have the data reuse, and they don’t have the forms.
    It is my belief that, in the future, all data systems will function like semantic wikis, in their flexibility, editability (in most cases, everyone who can read the content will also be able to edit it), and version history. That is not to say that all systems will be semantic wikis, and certainly not that all of them will use Semantic MediaWiki —Google Docs is a good example of a system that has these attributes to a large extent, but is not a semantic wiki. Still, semantic wikis are the easiest way to get all these features, and Semantic MediaWiki is currently the best and most advanced semantic wiki software. And of course it’s free software, in both senses of the word. So I think SMW is positioned to become an important part of the software ecosystem in the future.

    This doesn’t even get to the issue of reuse of data between systems — in the general sense, and in the specific sense of the Semantic Web. Semantic MediaWiki is sometimes grouped in as a Semantic Web technology, though in most cases its users make no use of the Semantic Web, in the sense of importing or exporting content in RDF or a comparable format. But it certainly can be used to do both, and with extensions like External Data, it can make use of data in more standard formats as well. The Semantic Web, as a technology and framework, is growing in importance, and it certainly has had no shortage of buzz. If and when it ever achieves mainstream use, semantic wikis, and SMW in particular, will be a natural choice for publishing Semantic Web content.
    Within this context, it’s worth mentioning Wikidataagain. This project will, if successful, create a massive, queryable database comprising all of the structured information that one expects to find on Wikipedia. It will be something new in the history of the world: a source of structured information that can, in theory, be used by computers to answer