Thread:Guidelines / policy relating to ancillary web services (e.g. Google Custom Search) (2)

Hi Kim,

Thanks for these inputs -- much appreciated.

This solid well-founded advice.


 * The current Mediawiki search facility is based on Lucene technology, and from what we can see, Lucene is an active and growing community. In alignment with our values -- WikiEducator should not replace an Free Software solution in favour of a non free service. For example, we shouldn't replace the default MW search for a non-free external service.
 * We have been talking about the Semantic Mediawiki extension -- it is an impressive technology and I'm keen to investigate further. At the same time, we're being prudent at this stage preferring not to overcommit until we have reasonable assurances of adequate funding to support technologies like SMW as well as code development work to contribute back to the community.
 * Agreed -- the default is Libre and our commitment to free cultural works (most notably open and editable file formats for our core OER business is non negotiable.)
 * Agreed on the decoupling of services -- search is not our forte but we can focus on creative solutions on our end to provide metadata in ways which can be harvested more effectively through services like oercommons.org (but I do worry about their default license which by our interpretation is a non-free license :-(.), search,creativecommons.org and others.