2009/2/3 Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de:
We should *really* push for decent metadata support in mediawiki. An appropriate extension already exists, see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:RDF. That extension would make it easy to generate RDF (with Dublin Core, Creative Commons and other voicabularies) for each image (and any other page).
We should request that extension as a community. If it's not quite ready for prime time, I'm sure it can be made ready.
So, what should we do, exactly? File a bug report and pile-on with comments/votes? Hold an on-wiki vote? Is there some other way of demonstrating that we consider it important?
3- Wikipedia doesn't have an OAI interface so we would need to look at how to ingest the data.
Use the API? http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=query&gener...
It's not really that simple, is it?
Here is one imageinfo "comment":
{{BotMoveToCommons|en.wikipedia}} {{Information |Description={{en|ME}} |Source=Transferred from [http://en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia]; transferred to Commons by [[User:Fale]] using [http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/commonshelper.php CommonsHelper].<br/
(yes, it ends in malformed html!)
Pretty obvious that a middle layer of "community API" is required, isn't it?
We DO have an OAI interface: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_update_feed_service.
"A new release of the OAI client for MediaWiki 1.7, offering best compatibility with current Wikipedia data rendering, is scheduled for late July 2006." Can't wait!!
Is "near-real-time" implicit in OAI? If not, and if OAI is a common standard amongst cultural institutions etc, then doesn't it make more sense to have a widely-available freely accessible OAI interface?
cheers Brianna