On 7/12/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Although infoboxes can annoy a lot of people (certainly me), they do vastly increase the utility of Wikipedia in one very important respect: they provide data in a machine-parseable form.
This is REALLY COOL STUFF and makes the Wikipedia database useful for all sorts of things, including ones we haven't thought of yet. Note, for instance, that the {{coord}} template is already used by Google Earth and other mapping applications.
So, how's our progress in making infoboxes more consistent?
Counter-question: When will we (programmers) be able to query the database (within MediaWiki, through an extension, the toolserver, or an API) for values passed to templates? Will that part of the SW code be integrated in the actual Wikipedia code soon? Or does that have to wait for "full" SW integration? Is it decided that SW integration will happen at all?
Timeframe, anyone?
Magnus