YvesChaix

Hi Yves, I just read with great interest your ideas on establishing an engineering wiki. Together with some friends I founded Wikiproducts and I think our ideas are not so far from one another. WikiProducts runs not with conventional Wikipedia-software but uses an extension called "Semantic Mediawiki". This Softwares does exactly what you are describing. It transforms the Wiki into a database that can be queried. In addition to the categories you can ask the database, e.g. to display all cellphones which have a weight of less than (or exactly) 98g, have UMTS and are not produced in China. You can also have the result listed and ask the wiki to display the specific product values (e.g. http://de.wiki-products.org/Strahlungsarme_Handys_im_Vergleich).

I have not understand all of your ideas but is it right that you imagine to upload the data not manually but from exisiting product databases, e.g. via XML-files? In general that could be possible too, on our wiki. However we have not explored the possibilities of that since we are not sure if such a practice would violate copyrights. We run the wiki as a not-for-profit organization and aim at eventually making it part of the the Wikimedia foundation.

So far we have focused on consumer goods and ethical issues around those. However, this could become just one aspect of "WikiProducts", which at the same time could grant access to engineers (who might as well be interested in those as well as further aspects) looking for specific parts. There could be different portals, like in Wikipedia. Furthermore we focused on developing the german version, since we are based in the german part of Switzerland.

We are desperately seeking people who participate in this project and would be very happy if you would like to bring in your ideas and energy.

Hope to hearing from you soon. My best, --Kasimir Katowitsch 13:12, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Kasimir: I have no idea how to get in touch with you. Your name tag says there is no valid email associated. Call me on Skype (yveschaix54158) or email me: ychaix@ibw.com.ni