On 07/04/2008, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:

Alas, that may mean it's a bit at odds with the wysiwyg ideal of 'hide those awful templates'. To the extent that templates are things like infoboxes, those *can* be sensible separated from body text and handled easily. To the extent that references, formatting, and data relations are extensively embedded *into* body text, that's where things get a bit ugly.

Yeah. When I say "templates" above, I meant "infoboxes" - which I wasn't much of a fan of until it clicked that they were in fact machine-readable information. (Presumably for the Opera project and suchlike, we can have a "display=no" parameter.) References are a whole other spitball of sheer joy ...

Infoboxes are a start on machine readability. Some short articles, the entire content can basically be encoded in the infobox. If only RamBot had done that for US places in 2003.

I suppose I should cc large chunks of this thread to wikien-l, this is really the technical end of "editorial".

- d.