As many of you are aware, I have been planning to have Semantic Mediawiki installed on this wiki.
For those of you know do not know, Semantic Mediawiki is an extension for Mediawiki, the system our wiki, and every other wiki on Wikia runs on. It allows the system to be aware of not just pages being traditionally linked to eachother, but how they are related, and build more compicated queries from that.
Right now we can search "Hiroki Ishiyama" and get Hiroki's page. With Semantic Mediawiki, we could also search "all episodes with Hiroki Ishiyama" and have an auto-generated list of exactly that.
I have hoped to have this installed on our wiki, and requested it be installed.
Sadly, although Wikia is supporting current installations, they are no longer supporting new installations of Semantic wiki.
Here are the communications I have had with Wikia, make what you will of them:
Inital E-mail:
Nate Watson, Aug 16 03:36 pm (UTC):
Due to the growing amount of traffic and pages our wiki, http://codelyoko.wikia.com/wiki/ has, the other admins and I have talked it over, and we would like to have Semantic Mediawiki installed on our wiki. I have read over the manual for it, and I believe my people can set up the semantic relationships. Could one of you at Wikia please install Semantic Mediawiki?
Regarding the subextensions, as far as I know, we do not need Semantic Drilldown installed at this time. However, Semantic Forms will be needed if/when Semantic Mediawiki is installed. I do not know if Wikia supports it, but Semantic Maps would be appreciated, as would Semantic Results Format.
I can be reached at nate.watson@yandex.com . Thank you.
Initial Response:
Hi Deadcoder,
Thanks for contacting Wikia. Unfortunately, due to compatibility issues and other technical limitations with Wikia, we no longer offer Semantic MediaWiki as an option. If there are other extensions you feel would be helpful, feel free to let us know and we can see if it's something we can offer you. Thanks!
Best regards, Brandon Rhea Wikia Community Support
My Response:
Are these compatibility issues and technical limitations mainly because Wikia doesn't upgrade their instances of Mediawiki? Or is their another reason such installations can't be done?
His Response:
Deadcoder,
To be honest the main issue with SMW on a wiki hosting service like Wikia is scaling. One installation of SMW is fairly taking as is plus each installation usually needs at least one admin who is very knowledgeable in the software's best practices. When you scale that out over 200 wikis with a handful of admins who have honestly made mistakes and caused significant memory leaks, then you can begin to see why it's extremely difficult to support what we already have, much less think about sending it out. As such, until there's a clearer solution (and we are looking at upgrading SMW independently of a general MediaWiki installation, but even so I don't think the performance improvements in SMW 1.8 will really tip the balance), we simply have to say no. This is unfortunate. I am a huge user of the software myself and understand it's power. But it's simply too technically expensive to justify the further risk.
Timothy Quievryn Director of Technical Support Wikia Community Support Team
My botched attempt at getting some wiggle room
I am fairly knowledgeable about the best practices for this extension; and I am a crat on the wiki in question. Is that enough to allow for an installation, or are you referring to Wikia-level admins?
I realize that this is a performance heavy extension, and it can have leaks; but my wiki has a very high ratio of people asking for various information semantic mediawiki could provide "usually for pages" vs. people who can readily provide it at that time. Semantic would be a major improvement.
Is there a lighter more limited version of semantic that we could consider, or something equivalent? I realize that there are too many issues that prevent semantic being installed right now. Is there something similar we could consider instead?
half decent response:
Hello,
While I don't disagree that the extension is useful or that certain admins would be better served to administrate it, Wikia simply does not have the technical resources at this time to offer Semantic MediaWiki and as such we are not offering any installation of the tool.
Timothy Quievryn Director of Technical Support Wikia Community Support Team
Perhaps we should put this on hold and apply for it again around December or so, that way Wikia has time to make the necessary technical changes, where it may be possible for us to access the extension.
Worst case scenario, I have several backup plans.
Plan C: we attempt to make a deal with Wikia, in that if we can make enough performance improvements to the wiki to compensate for it, we will get Semantic; and in exchange, they can use our changes Wikia-wide.
Plan D: the far more complicated "read fun" plan: We implement the same features of Semantic within the namespaces we can access, rather than at the extension level. Translation, we make it ourselves, in a way we can install it; then install it.
Since negotiations with Wikia haven't been going well for us up to this point, I doubt that plan C would be the best/most effective approach. Plan D sounds the most reasonable if it comes down to that.
Personally, I think we should attempt to implement plan C; and then if that fails, we do plan D.
I feel like it's going to be a waste of time if it doesn't work. If we spend time making performance updates, but Wikia doens't accept our deal, that's time that we could have been working on making it ourselves. So basically, if we want quicker results, try plan D, if you're willing to wait on it, try plan C.
i feel we should work on making a more active chat room community. but that is just me.
probably but it is unlikely either way. but thanks for the sugestion, i will do it over the weekend
I don't understand why Semantic Mediawiki is so important. If you're looking for "all episodes with Hiroki Ishiyama", just go to Hiroki Ishiyama, section Appearances. Or make a category, put in all of those episodes, and search Category: Episodes with Hiroki Ishiyama (I could even make a bot to make the category).
You are right in that we can do that.
However, your system only works with simple queries, whereas Semantic Mediawiki can deal with much more complicated queries.
But that's not my main complaint with this thread. The main complaint is that Wikia is failing to provide adequate customer support. They are refusing to add an extension at our request, mainly because of their own failure to maintain their products, and hire people to support them. That is grounds for complaint.
What do you think?