KDE and Wikipedia

A collaboration between KDE and Wikimedia was made public at Jimbo's keynote speech at the Karlsruhe LinuxTag in Germany on June 23, 2005. (Netzpolitik article, Babelfish translation.)

Jimbo Wales and Matthias Ettrich (right) at the Wikipedia booth at Linuxtag, Karlsruhe

KDE & Wikipedia

Rationale

We want to provide our desktop users with a way to easily access Wikipedia content. At the same time we want to create a technology that developers of other projects can draw from. Presenting: the KDE Wikipedia integration. This is good for KDE, but also for everyone else, since the Webservice API will be open for everyone.

A solution path for this problem that could be worked on both by developers and the Wikipedia community and that could be started with right now within the Wikipedia Community is described in Generic article retrieval. It would improve the situation for applications like KStars and Kalzium without any further MediaWiki hacking and with further programming also in other kinds of applications.

Webservices

Wikipedia will provide a web service API that can be queried. It can be used by any application just as the Wikipedia webinterface can be used by any individual. SOAP/WSDL is probably the best choice since it can deliver semantics (as opposed to XML-RPC) and is an accepted industry standard although no longer used by e.g. Google, so it's easier for developers to consolidate on one standard.

Native KDE API

KDE will provide an API that will query the Wikipedia webservice if a network connection is available, else it will try to launch Knowledge.

Indexer

A common indexer for both the online and offline version. It will most likely be (C-)Lucene, but we are open for better suggestions.

Available Applications

Amarok

Amarok displaying information on Don Henley from Wikipedia.

Amarok is a sophisticated audioplayer for KDE that provides the user with all kind of contextual information using different web services. It uses Wikipedia to provide the user with details about artists, album and title of the current track if possible.

Knowledge

Knowledge offline reader showing the Law article.

Knowledge is a Qt4 (soon to be KDE4)-based offline reader for Wikipedia. Its main goal is to serve as an offline substitution of the wikipedia interface in case no internet connection is available (either permanently or temporary).

Possible Applications

KStars

KStars is KDE's desktop planetarium to explore the night sky. Wikipedia can provide information about celestial body and interstellar phenomena.

Marble

Marble (formerly: "Globepedia") is an emerging educational world map browser for KDE. Wikipedia provides information about countries, cities, territories, etc.

Kalzium

KDE's chemistry application could look up articles about elements and even find related articles (things that are mainly made from a certain element).

Scribus

Scribus can create books out of a selection of Wikipedia articles. de:Wikireader

KOffice

KOffice could use Commons as remote clipart repository.

Documentation

KDE could use Mediawiki for its documentation and host it in Wikibooks

KIPI/Digikam

It could be possible to transfer batches of images to Commons directly from Digikam. See commons:User:Guillom/KIPI and https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206842

Many more:

• The Panel Clock ("This day in history"),
• Screensaver (random article).
• Konjue (providing a translation of the verb)
• Kopete
• Krecipes (download recipes from cookbook)

External links

English

• Heise: English translation
• dot.KDE # KDE and Wikipedia Announce Cooperation
• Slashdot Wikipedia and KDE Cooperation Announced

German

• Netzpolitik.org: 23.6.2005 KDE / Wikipedia Partnerschaft auf dem LinuxTag präsentiert
• LinuxNacht: 23.6.2005 Linuxnacht über Wikipedia
• Pro-Linux: [1]
• Golem: [2]
• Computerwoche: [3]
• Heise.de: [4]
• de.internet.com: [5]
• derstandard.at: [6]
• N24.de: [7]