On 9/6/07, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Agree. We don't need to have ONE template on ALL images, we can (and should) have a number of templates, as long as it's documented. Ie. we have a page listing all of "valid" templates and describing its arguments. If a bot knows that Information_Louvre->source is equivalent to Information->Author it can happily work with any of them being present. Just keep it documented (and a working parsing implementation).
Another example are PD books templates. They have everything about the image "Page X from book Y, by Foo on Year on public domain". Here the source & author values for the template would be hardcoded.
The problem that comes up is that people just constantly invent new templates often with trivial differences like hard-coded sources, authorship, or licensing information. These are especially bad cases because when it's stuffed into the template it is as though it isn't provided at all.. until someone goes through and special-cases that template. Eventually we'll end up with 10million images and 1 million templates, one for each source.. just because our uploading tools suck and people are abusing templates to avoid retyping source or licensing info. :-/
It's utterly unacceptable to expect any tools to keep up with that.
Most of the fields in information are common to virtually every image why should someone have to support 40 different ways of reading the same three or four basic pieces of information which are common to all images? Why should the same basic three or four fields have a different presentation randomly on some images?
It would be better to add lots of optional arguments to information.. or offer secondary additional information templates which have less uniformity but more flexibility.