Consistency of infoboxes [Wikitech-l] New Wikipedia interface in development - WikiEN-l

12 Jul 2007


      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?
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com
Date: 12-Jul-2007 16:31
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] New Wikipedia interface in development
To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On 12/07/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
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SemanticWiki would be a key feature in making that idea a reality.
Parsing the plain text articles can only provide very limited data for
answering such questions.
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Infoboxes and so forth are very popular on en:wp - Google already uses
{{coord}} like this, but the other infoboxes are a pretty good source
of this sort of parseable data. Note that infoboxes are not entirely
consistent as yet.
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That's what I mean by limited: you can only get data that is in
infoboxes. SemanticWiki would allow the parsing of far more data.
Although the SMW extension isn't live on WMF servers, we can at least
gather the data in a parseable form like this. The various infoboxes
are slowly converging and becoming more consistent in their fields;
they may conceivably supersede or incorporate {{PERSONDATA}} on en:wp.
(The consistency usually works by a process of people making them
consistent then doing a bot run to fix the articles.) Then the data
will easily be converted to SMW form.
So we'll get there, but slowly :-)
- d.