On 07/04/2008, Brion Vibber <brion(a)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.