Wave is not to replace e-mail ... yet

At the Google meeting in Amsterdam, one of the most interesting fact about Wave for me was about Wave and e-mail. While it has always been said that Wave is "how we would build e-mail today", today Wave keeps its distance from e-mail.

Wave presents a different paradigm from e-mail and this paradigm needs to evolve. In order to do so, it needs to keep a distance because otherwise it is particularly the e-mail associated aspects that improve.

Lars and Stephanie explained that in an earlier incarnation, Wave did include much functionality with e-mail in mind but that proved to hinder rather then help the development of the Wave paradigm, so they binned it. Similar functionality may be added later and will probably be added by another party.

This is similar to what we do with MediaWiki, our approach is that Wave provides superior editing while MediaWiki provides superior publishing. Our challenge is to appreciate these different strengths and bring them together. As long as we do not need to touch the MediaWiki functionality, there is the easy upgrade path for Wikipedia that we seek.

Our challenge is to find ways in Wave to leave MediaWiki alone and interface and provide necessary functionality in Wave. Some things are still missing; internationalisation and localisations is crucial not only for the core product but also for the robots. The use of MediaWiki authentication and authorisation, including blocks, is crucial. As crucial is the availability of the Wave code so that we can play with the look and feel, add toolbars and add to the toolbars. The fun thing is that our use case provides the Wave developers with concrete challenges. It has already served to punch holes in some theories and help improve them.

All in all, Wave is awesome and it was wonderful and productive to meet in person.
Thanks,
GerardM

Wave and education

We met at the first class restaurant at the Amsterdam central station and we discussed the potential of Wave in an educational setting. As you can imagine, many issues with Wave were discussed but the question was: "Is Wave ready for an experimental course where educators try to find out if Wave is a tool that makes sense in education".

When Wave is to be used in education, Wave itself will not be the subject and in this experiment it will be. The audience if the experiment will be educators who are interested to learn if the new paradigm that Wave presents is this leap forward. Such an experiment does not necessarily require everything that is needed for students: internationalisation and localisation can be left for later, it will be easy to find the necessary Wave invites. Functionality that makes sense in an educational setting like new content that is triggered either by the teacher of by conditions can be left for later as well.

We need to learn if Wave adds value. When it does and, we believe it will, the other open issues will need to be addressed as well. First we have to learn if Wave can enthuse educators.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Google Amsterdam

When Tom learned that Douwe Osinga was in the Netherlands, it was a great opportunity to seek a meeting and learn what the time line is for Wave.

If one thing is clear, it is that by the end of September 100.000 people will gain access to the Wave environment. Beyond that a lot of hard work is still to be done to make Wave ready. For us in the MediaWiki Wave project, it is clear that we will not wait for the APIs that will be ready in "two weeks". What we can do is sanitise the existing code, and include new functionality like the syntax highlighter written by Kim. There are plenty of things we can add to our code, using MediaWiki authentication is one of them and we will.

When you meet people like Douwe, it is a great moment to ask and inform about the issues on our end as well. There are two key show stoppers that will prevent adoption of Wave in the Wikimedia Foundation they are:

• Wave must be published open source
• Wave must include internationalisation infrastructure
  

In the way Google is developing Wave, they want to provide a stable product that will provide people a stable basis for further development. Some of the software provides this basis and this allowed for our project while other parts are just not ready. This is a reasonable rationale but it is equaly understandable that the WMF will not adopt software that is not published open source.

Given that there are Wikipedias in over 250 languages, all software has to be internationalised. At this time, the core Wave functionality includes the message structures that provide the basic building blocks for internationalisation. It is not clear how these building blocks are to be used in our software. It is not yet clear how we will interface with the Wave data; in MediaWiki we distinguish between the language of the content and the language of the interface. Wave does allow for multiple languages in the content.

What will be interesting is how we will resolve the issues we have with projects that use incorrect language codes. This is an issue that the WMF should address anyway. The easiest option would be to support only those projects with advanced software that conform to the relevant standards.
Thanks,
GerardM