3 ms·

Would love to hear people's experience with it, especially for more complex things. Seen it used a few times to add consistent metadata to pages (through forms)

by detaro 3y ago

Would love to hear people's experience with it, especially for more complex things. Seen it used a few times to add consistent metadata to pages (through forms), but never much built on top of such basics.

duskwuff 3y ago
Perhaps surprisingly, it isn't particularly useful for general encyclopedias like Wikipedia. Real life is messy; it doesn't always reduce cleanly to a set of key/value pairs. Where extensions like SMW really shine is for wikis which discuss highly structured content, like content in video games. Another extension which I've seen used in this space is Cargo [1]. [1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cargo https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cargo
resolutebat 3y ago
Around 10 years ago I experimented with this to try to create a geographical hierarchy of articles in a wiki. It was, in a nutshell, not great: there's a fundamental contradiction between wikis, which are very loosely structured and edited by humans who do all sorts of wacky unpredictable shit, and hierarchies, which need to be carefully pruned and maintained. So this use case didn't work, and I think it's telling that (AFAIK) not a single Wikimedia project has adopted it.
- detaro 3y ago
  as duskwuff said, wikipedia projects are a very open scope, that'd be hard to model. So I really wonder if there are any complex (but not as-complex-as-wikipedia) expamples people had success with.
- bawolff 3y ago
  Wikimedia adopted Wikibase (aka Wikidata) instead to fill that niche. SemanticMediaWiki has some questionable scalability when it comes to large sites. Wikimedia was never going to adopt it for technical reasons.
  - Fannon 3y ago
    I've build a few Semantic MediaWikis in my past and share the concern about scalability. But also be aware that in many cases you might not need such a scalability like managing semantic data for all of Wikimedias major wikis in different languages. For small to medium sized companies or communities, I think SMW can scale well enough - depending on how you use it. The advantage of SMW imho is still that it brings the semantic / structured data features right into the MediaWiki itself and that there's a big ecosystem of related extensions around it (like Page Forms). So far I don't know of an open-source information management system which comes close in capability to this. Setting this all up and maintaining it is difficult, though - I even had to start developing custom tools to assist me with that once it got more complex.
    - bawolff 3y ago
      I mean, I'd agree. Most people do not operate at scale, and prematurely optimizing for a scale that most people will never reach is a bad idea. However if we're talking about Wikipedia, any scaling concerns at all basically make it a non-starter.
dankilman 3y ago
The guild wars 2 wiki makes great use of it imo
- zeeZ 3y ago
  It does, though a recent update to the wiki broke things for some time. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2_Wiki:Reporting_wiki_bugs https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2_Wiki:Reporting...
RicoElectrico 3y ago
Check out WikiChip for an example of it. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/WikiChip https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/WikiChip
r1ch 3y ago
We used SMW at Liquipedia, an esports wiki. The idea was that all the data about players and teams could be exposed through SMW. Unfortunately we're now in the process of transitioning away from it due to major performance issues and data inconsistencies. It might be ok on smaller wikis but for us it's become a source of a lot of problems.
Blackthorn 3y ago
I used it on a popular wiki for adding metadata that allowed for decently powerful search filterings. It was important to do this because mediawiki's default search is/was absolutely horrible. We never bothered doing anything like concepts, detailed types, etc...we only used it for basically adding tags to pages that you could query as part of a search. It worked okay with that. We had some issues where we wished a property could be an enumeration or nullable, which I don't think ever happened in one of their many releases. Adding the metadata represented a bit of a challenge. We eventually had it generated from templates that would usually get filled out anyway.

by detaro 3y ago

duskwuff 3y ago

Perhaps surprisingly, it isn't particularly useful for general encyclopedias like Wikipedia. Real life is messy; it doesn't always reduce cleanly to a set of key/value pairs. Where extensions like SMW really shine is for wikis which discuss highly structured content, like content in video games. Another extension which I've seen used in this space is Cargo [1]. [1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cargo https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cargo

resolutebat 3y ago

Around 10 years ago I experimented with this to try to create a geographical hierarchy of articles in a wiki. It was, in a nutshell, not great: there's a fundamental contradiction between wikis, which are very loosely structured and edited by humans who do all sorts of wacky unpredictable shit, and hierarchies, which need to be carefully pruned and maintained. So this use case didn't work, and I think it's telling that (AFAIK) not a single Wikimedia project has adopted it.

detaro 3y ago
as duskwuff said, wikipedia projects are a very open scope, that'd be hard to model. So I really wonder if there are any complex (but not as-complex-as-wikipedia) expamples people had success with.
bawolff 3y ago
Wikimedia adopted Wikibase (aka Wikidata) instead to fill that niche. SemanticMediaWiki has some questionable scalability when it comes to large sites. Wikimedia was never going to adopt it for technical reasons.
- Fannon 3y ago
  I've build a few Semantic MediaWikis in my past and share the concern about scalability. But also be aware that in many cases you might not need such a scalability like managing semantic data for all of Wikimedias major wikis in different languages. For small to medium sized companies or communities, I think SMW can scale well enough - depending on how you use it. The advantage of SMW imho is still that it brings the semantic / structured data features right into the MediaWiki itself and that there's a big ecosystem of related extensions around it (like Page Forms). So far I don't know of an open-source information management system which comes close in capability to this. Setting this all up and maintaining it is difficult, though - I even had to start developing custom tools to assist me with that once it got more complex.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    I mean, I'd agree. Most people do not operate at scale, and prematurely optimizing for a scale that most people will never reach is a bad idea. However if we're talking about Wikipedia, any scaling concerns at all basically make it a non-starter.

dankilman 3y ago

The guild wars 2 wiki makes great use of it imo

zeeZ 3y ago
It does, though a recent update to the wiki broke things for some time. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2_Wiki:Reporting_wiki_bugs https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2_Wiki:Reporting...

RicoElectrico 3y ago

Check out WikiChip for an example of it. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/WikiChip https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/WikiChip

r1ch 3y ago

We used SMW at Liquipedia, an esports wiki. The idea was that all the data about players and teams could be exposed through SMW. Unfortunately we're now in the process of transitioning away from it due to major performance issues and data inconsistencies. It might be ok on smaller wikis but for us it's become a source of a lot of problems.

Blackthorn 3y ago

I used it on a popular wiki for adding metadata that allowed for decently powerful search filterings. It was important to do this because mediawiki's default search is/was absolutely horrible. We never bothered doing anything like concepts, detailed types, etc...we only used it for basically adding tags to pages that you could query as part of a search. It worked okay with that. We had some issues where we wished a property could be an enumeration or nullable, which I don't think ever happened in one of their many releases. Adding the metadata represented a bit of a challenge. We eventually had it generated from templates that would usually get filled out anyway.