Sorry to all, <br>I forgot to change the header of the message and Alex replied to all<br>and not to me only. <br>My bad, please ignore. <br>I'm resending the original message below. <br><br>Aubrey<br>----<br><br>Being the problem of metadata a long pain which is bothering wikimedia projects from beginning, and Wikisource is no exception.<br>
<br><div class="im">If we want to be a reliable digital library, we should
face the fact that our information about books are not using standards
(e.g Dublin Core) nor are machine-readable. MediaWiki still doesn't have
a proper extension for handling metadata, and SemanticMediaWiki is not
used for some reasons I understand only partially (security and
scalability issues, as far as I know).<br>
<br>Thus, what I'm gonna present you is just a proposal, made by Alex
Brollo, in the quick-and-dirty DIY style that we see often in wikis. <br><div><br>As all of you know, Wikisource uses the (beloved) #lst
extension, usually used only into the proofread procedure. <br></div>In It.source, we are
exploring into it.source some other possibile uses of #lst extension,
the main one is to create something like "variables", that can be used
everywhere into our site. In a nut-shell, it's a DIY "semantization" of text. <br><div>
<br>Simply, if you put the code <section begin="birth date" />May
6, 1876<section end="birth date" /> into a "Author:Pinco Pallino",
you can obviuosly access to birth date of the imaginary author Pinco
Pallino with #lst:<br>
<br>{{#section:Author:Pinco Pallino|birth date}}</div></div><div><div class="im"><br>that is pretty intuitive.<br>(it should work also with the brand-new syntax ## ##)<br><br>Using
this "emerging feature" we are converting all the parameters of main,
standard templates into "DIY variables" by bot, with very interesting,
unexpected results.<br><br></div>You obviously need to put the "extracted data" somewhere: in it.source we decided <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">to <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">test as a data container both</span></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> Talk pages (nsPage:) and main page itself,</span> with a Javascript system for hiding the code to users<div class="im">
<br>
(but it's there). Of course, if things go ahed we could even request a Data: namespace...<br>
<br>Currently, we are using this feature to show in with a single
template the year and the status of a single text or page. For examples,
<br>see <a href="http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Pagina_principale/Sezioni#Ultimi_arrivi" target="_blank">http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Pagina_principale/Sezioni#Ultimi_arrivi</a>. <br>
Or to show the page status in the transcluded version: <a href="http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Storia_di_una_capinera/II" target="_blank">http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Storia_di_una_capinera/II</a> <br>
<br>At the end of the day, we have a system to "extract data" e do
whatever we want with them. If we had proper templates following Dublin
Core (and maybe a form Upload-like to put the data inside), we could
even solve the bulk of our metadata issue. In Paris, in the GLAM
conference, we'll probably discuss a lot about these<br>
(definitely, I will).<br><br>So we want to ask you if there are any other similar experience, and which drawbacks do you see. <br>We are aware that the system is heavy, it's not the way to fix this kind of problem, <br>
and stuff like that. If you can amend it, or suggest better practices/procedure, you are definetely welcome. <br>For once, it would be very good to coordinate/collaborate together in developing an important tool as this seem to be. <br>
<br>Cheers,<br><br>Aubrey<br>WMI Board<br></div></div>
<br>