On 9/6/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/6/07, Dschwen lists@schwen.de wrote:
But wouldn't it be smarter to split {{Information Louvre}} into {{Information}} and {{Louvre}}, and use as many of the fields in Information as possible and put additional data into the louvre template. This way even a dumb bot could harvest some data from the image page (without knowledge about tons of special purpose templates).
Exactly! +1. Just split out the duplicate fields. At lest then there is exactly one uniform way to read the data which is common.
There would also be value in doing the same with narrower and narrower sets of data ... a {{Information painting}} which has fields which are common to all paintings but not common to all images (and optional fields common to most),.. then {{Information Louvre}} would be left with only those fields which are really unique to works in the louvre. (location/catalog information).
The way I see it, there are three possible ways for a bot to get meta information about an image from a template: 1. From the wiki text 2. From the rendered HTML 3. From some future to-be-automatically-generated page:template:variable_key:value data set
#1 is hard/impossible to do correctly (though it might work in many cases), as only the MediaWiki parser can parse this stuff correctly (mor or less...). #2 is correct (since it was done by the MediaWiki parser), but slow. #3 IMHO is the only long-term solution. I have proposed this several times, on several lists. Last thing I heard, semantic wikipedia will take care of it. As soon as it get installed, on Commons...
Maybe I will erite an extension for that. It won't get installed, as usual, but it might be fun to do. And then I can complain even more! :-)
Magnus