It's come up repeatedly from talking to people, and from my own experience, that one of the biggest weaknesses of the Semantic MediaWiki system, if not the biggest at the moment, is the lack of a good document to explain things to beginning users. This is not a knock on the documentation on
semantic-mediawiki.org and elsewhere, which is all very helpful; but there's no substitute for a linear narrative that explains every detail and how it fits into the bigger picture. Specifically, I think the most needed documentation would be an online tutorial video that explains Semantic MediaWiki and some of its extensions. I propose to create such a video. Because of the very large amount of information involved, the plan is to actually divide it into ten parts, each of which could be viewed on its own. You can see my proposed outline for this video here:
Given the size of the project, I don't think I can do it without funding. If you, your company or your organization could benefit from the existence of such a video - whether it's to learn more about the system yourself, to help educate your employees or wiki co-editors, to make potential clients more comfortable and knowledgeable about it, or just because you believe in the SMW project and want it to grow - please consider funding the project. I'm not asking for money yet; I just want to get a sense for whether funding of this video is possible.
Sponsoring this project could also allow you to have more input on the actual contents of the video before it gets completed, and also to have your organization's name listed as an official sponsor. If you're interested in sponsoring or otherwise funding this project, please let me know how much financial support you would be willing to provide.
And of course, donations for my other work on SMW extensions are always welcome; if you want to send funding simply as a way to sponsor the work I've done so far, that would be very much appreciated too.
Thanks,
Yaron