Jimmy Wales announces Wikimedia Foundation partnership with KDE
6/23/2005
Today at LinuxTag, a free-software Expo held in Karlsruhe, Germany, Jimbo Wales announced a formal partnership between the Wikimedia Foundation and the makers of the K Desktop Environment (KDE).
According to a blog posting by Sven Krohlas of KDE, the cooperation of the two groups means they will now be able to achieve several technical goals, including an API , which will allow KDE developers to easily embed Wikipedia data in their applications.
The news extends beyond KDE and the Foundation, as the API will be open. Presumably, access to a sanctioned API would significantly simplify data retrieval and encourage creative use of the data found in the Foundation's many projects, a boon for both developers and end-users alike.
Progress already made
Two months ago, KDE developer and German Wikipedian Daniel Molkentin announced project Knowledge. According to Daniel, "Once itâ€™s grown up, Knowledge is supposed to become a Wikipedia offline reader".
Similarly, isaaic's weblog points out that project amaroK, a music player for Linux and Unices, is already incorporating the data.
The single-most stifling factor related to Foundation projects thus far has been finding enough developers to both maintain current projects and also encourage innovation and creation. Certainly the enthusiastic support of an entire community of programmers is an import step towards solving this problem, and creating new, better ones.
A co-operation between the KDE group - makers of a free desktop for Linux - and the Wikimedia Foundation has been announced at the LinuxTag Conference in Karlsruhe. They intend to build a protocol which will make it possible to access Wikimedia project's data from any application, but especially from the KDE suite.

The KDE Group will try to integrate some of the applications from the package with Wikimedia data. For example, AmaroK, media player, will use Wikipedia data to show information about music being played at the moment. Some other applications, including chemical database Kalzium, a database of information about the sky KStars and office suite KOffice will use data from Wikipedia, or from its sister projects.

It will be based on SOAP/WSDL technology, which is already used by the Google API. It could be used on almost every platform and programming environment.

It is also possible to include the Wikipedia archive in some of KDE's CD editions to make it possible to use the data from Wikipedia on machines without an internet connection.