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Comment by physicsgraph | Hacker News Reader

As a counter example to the pessimism in this essay, an application of the Semantic web is the NASA EVA Wiki [0] which uses Semantic MediaWiki. Metrics on utilization are available [1].

[0] https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/EVA_Wiki

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/5_Year_NASA_Wikiversary

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Is that a counter example? From the first link:

> As more groups from Flight Operations hear about the EVA Wiki, they are requesting to start their own wiki. As of August 2015 there are 7 groups with wikis. Eventually every group will have their own wiki. One of the long-range goals is to enable inter-wiki semantic data transfer, as appropriate based on access restrictions.

The last sentence in particular got me. It's always a long-range goal :)

I'm a co-creator of the NASA Wikis and I wrote that 5 Year Wikiversary page. Early on we thought creating one wiki for every group was the way. We were wrong. It's better to have as few wikis as possible. We now structure our wikis based on the level of data protection. I think the intelligence agencies do this too.

See https://mediawiki.org/wiki/EMWCon_Spring_2019/Creating_the_I... for a talk about why and how we merged wikis after learning the hard way.

I link to other videos and info about our work on my user page: https://mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Darenwelsh

I need to start exploring the stats again as we're celebrating 10 years this coming November.

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