Working With MediaWiki

nearly any general-knowledge question. The fact that Wikidata and Semantic MediaWiki will most likely use a joint code base for storing their data is mostly secondary: Wikidata, if successful, will significantly raise both usage and awareness of the Semantic Web, in its various meanings. And at that point, SMW will hopefully stand as an obvious answer when people, in greater numbers, start to ask, “how we do add our own data to this thing?”

    In short, semantic wikis solve a lot of problems, some of which people don’t even view as problems before they’ve used one. And in the case of MediaWiki, the benefits of a semantic wiki are available just by downloading and installing some more extensions. It seems like a no-lose proposition. So, happy adventures in the world of collaborative data.

Colophon
    This book was created with the LyX document processor, which in turn uses the combined LaTeX and TeX typesetting system. The e-book version was generated using the applications Elyxer (which converts LyX files to HTML) and Calibre (which converts HTML files into e-books), along with a custom script to take care of some formatting issues. All of the applications listed here are open source, and all are highly recommended.
    For the printed book, the main text uses the Palatino typeface, while headers and PHP code are in Helvetica, and wikitext and other specialized syntax (XML, CSV etc.) are in Courier.

About the author

    Yaron Koren grew up in Israel and the United States. He has been a professional programmer since 1998. He has been doing MediaWiki development since 2006, and MediaWiki consulting since 2007. He currently runs the MediaWiki consulting company WikiWorks, and the MediaWiki-based wiki farm Referata. He lives in New York City with his wife.