EMWCon 2019, Day 2
Today was the second day of the Enterprise MediaWiki Conference, EMWCon, in Daly City at the Genesys headquarters.
The day started with my keynote on Wikidata and the Abstract Wikipedia idea. The idea was received very friendly.
Today, the day was filled with stories from people building systems on top of MediaWiki, and in particularly Semantic MediaWiki, Cargo, and some Wikibase. This included SFMoma presenting their system to collaboratively document art, using Cargo and Lua on the League of Legends wiki, running a whole wiki farm for Finnish memory and language institutions, the Lost Plays database, and - what I found particularly impressive - an engineer at NASA who implemented a workflow for document approval including authorization, audibality, and a full Web interface within a mere week, and still thinking that it could have been done much faster.
A common theme was "how incredibly easy it was". Yes, almost everyone mentioned something they got stumped on, and this really points to the community needing maybe more usage on StackOverflow or IRC or something, but in so many use cases, people who were not developers were able to create pretty complex workflows and apps right there in their browsers. This also ties in with the second common theme, that a lot of the deployments of such wikis are often starting "under the radar".
There were also genuinely complex solutions that were using Semantic MediaWiki as a mere component: Matteo Busanelli was presenting a solution that included lifting external data sources, deploying ontologies, reasoning, and all the whistles and bells - a very impressive and powerful architecture.
The US government uses Semantic MediaWiki in many places, most notably Intellipedia used by more than 16 intelligence agencies, Diplopedia by the Department of State, and Powerpedia for the Department of Energy. EPA's Statipedia is no more, but new wikis are popping up in other agency, such as WikITA for the International Trade Administration, and for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Canada's GCpedia was mentioned with a lot of respect, and the wish that the US would have something similar.
NASA has a whole wiki farm: within mission control alone they had 12 different wikis after a short while, many grown bottom up. They noticed that it would make sense to merge them together - which wasn't easy, neither technically nor legally nor managerially. They found that a lot of their knowledge was misclassified - for example, they classified handbooks which can be bought by anyone on Amazon. One of the biggest changes the wiki caused at NASA was that the merged ISS wiki lead to opening more knowledge to more people, and drawing the circles larger. 20% of the people who have access to the wikis actively contribute to the wikis! This is truly impressive.
So far, no edit has been made from space - due to technical issues. But they are working on it.
The day ended with a panel, asking the question where MediaWiki is in the marketplace, and how to grow.
Again, thanks to Yaron Koren and Cindy Cicalese for organizing the conference, and Genesys for hosting us. All presentations are available on YouTube.
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