Proposal:Separate content from style

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1. Achieve continued growth in readership
2. Focus on quality content
3. Increase Participation
4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
5. Encourage Innovation

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Summary

Today we have one application (Mediawiki) doing two distintict tasks:

• manage the database (the content)
• translate (render) the database information into an html page (the style)

but I think that it's better if these two tasks will be separated.

Proposal

• One application that manage the database with API via web (get an article, modify an article, ...)

  mw:API?

• A lot of different applications to display (and to edit) articles. These software will work on the web but also locally.

Example:

                               web
  User <--> local application <---> core application <--> database
                               API

 User to local application: "I want the article New_York_City"
 local application to core application: "Give me the page "New_York_City", I'm User, my password is ... "
 core application to database: "SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE ..."
 core application: "User has privileges to read "New_York_City" "
 core application to local application: "<article name="New_York_City">'''New York city''' is a [[city]] ...</article>"
 local application to user render the xml to a nice text (for example, but not necessary, an html page)
 

the local software can also be a web application.

Motivation

We need to switch to third millenium... mediawiki is too old. If we have api we can develop a lot of "local software", and not only one.

Look at wikipedia:OpenStreetMap openstreetmap internal structure: [1]. Do you see? One database, one api interface, and a lot of applications to visualize and to edit maps.

We can do applications that do something different from read/write, for example we can develop applications that do statistics, automatic edits, ...

Potential Costs

Good programmers.

Community Discussion

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