Wikimania is on and Scholia is off

Wikimania the wonderful gathering of Wikimedians is on in Paris. I have been there before, I have presented at several Wikimanias. It is truly awesome. It is the one place where all aspects of what the Wikimedia Foundation is come together, mingle and have a conversation. There is one inescapable fact; it is mostly about Wikipedia and at that, if it does not fit the English Wikipedia community, conversations will not bring you much.

The two biggest revolutions that happened lead to two new projects and apart from their function they did not change English Wikipedia. It was too expensive to have the same picture on all projects, pictures are now stored at Commons. The English community objected to its policy of only freely licensed pictures so nothing changed as they may still serve licensed materials as an illustration. Articles on the same subject were linked through "interwiki links" the process to maintain them was too costly, a centralised database was created, the links are now stable at Wikidata. The English community was not bothered because it were nerds mostly from other projects who maintained those interwiki links.

The decisions to have both Commons and Wikidata were made by the Wikimedia Foundation.

The 25th birthday of Wikipedia is celebrated in Paris and it has its challenges and opportunities. The biggest challenges in my opinion are communities that are aging and decreasing in size and information that is outdated or incomplete. Opportunities can be found in the "sum of all the knowledge that we already have". One iterative question for an AI: "What are the inconsistencies within our Wikipedias". Another is to have Abstract Wikipedia provide information for all the misses when an article is locally missing.

Why not challenge our public to be part of the solution?

Thanks,

       GerardM

PS Great tools like Scholia should be adopted by the Foundation so that it is always available and we could open up our references in a more informed fashion.