It's all very nice to have organizing metadata, and meticulous accuracy in our text, but in our search for perfection we lose sight of our objective of making the information available to the greatest possible public in a way they will understand. We want a place for scholarly comment and annotation of text in an environment where the user has a reasonable confidence in the accuracy of the root text. We want to enable wikilinks, and added footnotes. We want the user to be able to know that alternative treatment of the material is available at the click of a link, and sometimes on the same page.

Using the metadata in a card catalogue may help me to find some of the material in the library, but unless you can supplement this with the rich rewards of browsing the shelves. Telling people to RTFM is no substitute for the hands-on efforts of trial and error. It would surprise me if any more than a small fraction of Runeberg's users even knew that Dublin Core existed. As the manual which they must read it confuses more than it helps.

On 07/16/2010 03:03 AM, John Vandenberg wrote:
> This is also a problem with Wikimedia Commons.
>
> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Dublin_Core

It would take 5 minutes to implement the suggested support
for "Dublin core" metadata in the MediaWiki software. Why
is this in the 5 year strategic plan? Actually adding the
content of metadata to all pages could be a 5 year project,
but not the software support.

On my website, http://runeberg.org/ I have included
Dublin core metadata for more than a decade (see for
example http://runeberg.org/affdyaff/ ), but nobody
ever thanked me for this, and none of the pages were
included in Worldcat because of this. Visitors find the
website through Google full text search or by direct
links from Wikipedia and other sites, nobody reports
having discovered the site through the DC metadata.

I must be missing something. Why is DC metadata
so important? Could you give an example of a website
that does this and actually benefits from it?