I’m at day two of “Hacking Days,” the pre-conference for Wikimania conference occurring last week. This is turning out to e an amazing event because there are no venture capitalists (sorry Fred , no headhunters, no PR people, and most importantly NO CEOS! It’s people who build stuff… and people who build stuff only. So refreshing to be with the builders, not the BSers for once.

I’m going to drop some notes in here… so consider this an open thread.

1. There is a discussion about Semantic MediaWiki starting… this is gonna be great. The concept here is to add more structure to the data in wikipedia. For example, there are tons of NBA players in the Wikipedia, but you can’t sort them by points scored per game. The data is there, but it is not structured. The “semantic web” concept is to take text fields like this blog post and come up with standard ways to sort/search the information. You can read more about the problem here and here. See and example here.
2. Ajax is coming to Wikipedia–maybe. There was a discussion of adding groovy AJAX style features to the stable and thriving wikipedia. Frankly, I gotta tell ya that half the AJAX features (like popup registration pages) are NOT worth the trouble. Wikipedia is such an important resource it would be a shame for people to have to fight to edit and find things–I say use the simple technology and focus on the bigger problems.
3. WiktionaryZ.com is up next…

NOTE: I’ll keep updating this post as the day goes on.