On 14/06/12 00:39, jmcclure@hypergrove.com wrote:
Transclusion is surely fundamental to wiki application design. The [[wikidata]] proposal by contrast is a client-server API, such things an artifact of the 20th century. What is the point of it here?
Ultimately the problem you're grappling with is not just just about infoboxes, it's about *anything* other than article text that has multilingual requirements. For instance, the same *pie chart* is to be shared among wikipedias, the only difference being the graph's title, key and other labels... [[wikidata]] is today doing format=table, later other formats. That's alot to handle in an API.
I don't think Wikidata will ever do other formats. Wikidata will only export pure data.
So, it's highly advised the client-server API approach be scrapped. At a minimum, it's outdated technology, for good reasons. Instead, wikidata should *publish* infoboxes that are happily cached on wikidata servers. That's the best performance that can possibly be had.
Wikidata publishing infoboxes and Wikipedias using them is again the client-server model. And if Wikidata publishes infoboxes, pie charts and the like, THAT will complicate the API, not the current approach. Not to mention that Wikipedias have and want to have different infobox designs.