On 21/01/2008, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 21/01/2008, aliasd wiki4@da-bom.com wrote:
I would like to see infoboxes one day integrated more closely with the Wikipedia UI. It would be great to select an infobox by cat from a dropdown menu, have all the fields displayed form style with optionals marked as so. I think it would be incredibly easy to do without actually editing the infobox syntax. There is a bit of an issue with Infobox duplication and the ability for the novice to integrate infoboxes with articles.
I used to think of them as a bit of a blight, but one day realised, uh, these are machine-readable information and hence potentially vastly useful. The trick would be to standardise the plumbing behind them without changing each template - the fields and some of the behaviour need standardising.
dbpedia.org make use of infobox information to provide semantic RDF computer readable representations of wikipedia together with their other sources. I tried to explain this to the WikiProject Opera and Classical groups but I was hounded out by POV pushers IMO. I am still pro infoboxes for all wikipedia articles though.