On 5/4/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 04/05/07, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
I guess this is a roundabout way of saying I don't think this will be worked out until we get Semantic MediaWiki.
Until we come up with a Semantic MediaWiki syntax that's intuitively usable by mere mortals.
I don't buy this.
First, this is the syntax:
George Washington was an [[nationality::American]] President.
That is usable by a good number of people. Secondly, that example is doing it the hard way. The current infoboxes could be changed so that they include this information when the user uses them in exactly the same way they do now. Currently the article [[George Washington]] has a line in the infobox
| nationality=American
This could remain exactly the same and have the template changed to include this as a semantic statement.
My biggest objection is that we should wait until things are easy in general. Not everything has to be easy. Not everyone has to worry about the semantic aspects at all. It we waited until parserfunctions were easy to use would we have the super useful templates we have today? I don't care if a new user can edit [[Template:Backlognav]] it is useful regardless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Backlognav&action=edi... or http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Coord/input/dec&actio...
Templates using semantic mediawiki would be drastically less complicated than many of the templates using parserfunctions we use today. If the servers can't handle the increased load that some of the queries might have that's one thing, and maybe we should think about disabling that aspect, but assuming everything has to be dead simple before it can be useful holds up progress.
Judson [[:en:User:Cohesion]]