The presentation

I had hoped to publish both the presentation and the video of our presentation at Wikimania 2009 at the same time. As it is, the video has not yet been uploaded and I do not want to wait with providing you with the presentation.

The presentation went well. We did well to test the environment before the presentation; we had a glitch that was easily solvedas there was not the stress of a public watching.

When you introduce completely new functionality, it is important to inform and involve as much as possible. We found that there was a lot of interest for what we had to bring. Many people indicated that they were interested to test the Wave approach and many of the developers were interested in a Wave Sandbox account.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Media Wiki Wave

View more presentations from Gerard Meijssen.

Disruptive technology

When I understand Wave well, it is disruptive technology. When people talk about Wikipedia, one aspect of it is how it proved disruptive innovation as it changed the face of the market for encyclopaedic information.

What I got out of the feedback of our presentation at Wikimania, is that our MediaWiki Wave interface has the potential to be disruptive as well. Real time collaborative editing is what we will bring to MediaWiki and that will be disruptive. The current history pages of MediaWiki and its assessments expect serial changes by individual editors. All our tools to supress vandalism rely on this.

In the recordings of Wikivoices podcasts we experimented with collaborative editing and, it allowed us to write quality articles in a short period of times. Experiences like this gives me the conviction that Wikipedia can do with a bit of disruption of its own.

For those who claim that the end is neigh... I asked Luca de Alvaro what he thought about collaborative realtime editing; he first asked me if there was reliable historic data and then told me that it just needed a different algorithm.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Preparing for Wikimania

Wikimania 2009 is approaching fast and, it is important for us to present our project there as well. We have been told that we will be able to present our project so Tom, Kim and Gerard came together to discuss what to say and what to present.

We looked at our current functionality, we uploaded code to the Google project SVN even though it is of not much use at this stage. It still needs a lot of TLC before the code is in a state that approaches the "Brion ready" state.

We discussed the things we have to do before Oktober. We need people testing our code and we want to give interested MediaWiki developers access to Wave. We are comfortable that we can achieve both. Just watch this space for more information..

In our presentation, we will explain how we got involved, why we think Wave is important and we will demo what we consider are the key features for our MediaWiki Wave integration.
Thanks,
GerardM