Saturday, February 14, 2009

Jmol

Wikipedia is about education. Many of the subject in science are hard to grasp. How do you get your mind around a molecule, a protein.

The picture is one called 1D66.pdb, it is part of a group of five called "cartoons". When you look at the cartoons, you have the option to spin it or zoom in. The realisation that this is three dimensional really sinks in when you see it rotate.

The power of Jmol, is understood. I can remember that Tim Starling looked at the code and found that it is possible to include malicious code.

When you read the Jmol article on MediaWiki, you will read that they have fixed this in their revision 10467. What I would like is to have the extension for the WMF checked again. I do think it is important that we share the benefit of visualisation tools like Jmol.

The problem is the capacity of the WMF to review code. There are too few people who assess code. This is a problem that prevents tools like Jmol to be (re-)assessed. It is a problem that prevents the work of several developers from going live. This makes MediaWiki inward looking and prevents a wider acceptance of MediaWiki in the rest of the world.

I wonder, if the assessment of Jmol would gain priority when translatewiki.net localises this code ?
Thanks,
GerardM

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think the following steps should be followed:
1. get the Jmol MediaWiki extension in the MediaWiki svn (code that is no in the svn, will not be installed by Wikimedia)
2. get consensus on the desirability of the installation of Jmol on a sizeable Wikimedia wiki
3. create a bugzilla requesting installation
4. continue advocating the activation

Be prepared to wait a long time. About a dozen extension installation requests are waiting.