Hi,

Is the 'template' word so bad? Paraphrasing Daniel's definition of the MediaWiki template, one could see a 'WikiData template' as
a set of of properties that can be re-used, e.g. to make create statements about a certain class. (the 'parameter' bit could be understood as adding or removing properties from the templates, e.g. using twice a property or adding a new one when it's needed).

What we're after seems to exist already, described as 'item structure':
http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Visual_arts/Item_structure
Or 'list of properties':
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:List_of_properties/Works

'schema convention' matches the idea, but the wording may be too abstract. I come from a community that calls such things 'description set profiles'; such expressions have a hard time being adopted in less technical communities...


About the text values. A big +1 to Daniel at not trying to represent semi-structured text, which is meant to piggyback structured data in legacy systems that can't handle it. The matter is rather the availability in Wikidata of text-like summaries like the dbpedia-owl:abstract at http://dbpedia.org/page/Castle . Having things like this together with the Wikidata data would be great for data-reusers like us, instead of having to fetch it from elsewhere!

Antoine  ---
Antoine Isaac
R&D Manager, Europeana.eu