Lars Aronsson lars-at-aronsson.se |wikipedia| wrote:
Evan Prodromou wrote:
Anyways, I wanted to float a design idea for inclusion of metadata in MediaWiki articles. None of this is particularly new, and it seems like most has been suggested at one point or another.
In the wiki world, the article on Angola does not contain any formalized, hierarchical metadata markup such as [[part of:Africa]] or [[borders:Namibia]], but instead the plain English phrase "Angola is a country in southwestern [[Africa]], bordering [[Namibia]]".
That is not very surprising, since meta tags are yet to be implemented.
That's what wiki contributors can learn and be made to use.
Many articles contain complicated and advanced usages of HTML, and that seem to work out fine. Editors who don't know HTML simply leaves it for someone else to maintain. Meta tags would be much simpler to understand, probably not much harder than the interwiki links. There is the risk of scaring away newcomers if the first impression of wiki-text is too frightening, but meta tags could easily be hidden by default, if that is found to be a problem. (Or just hidden at the bottom of the article).
It doesn't require more complex parsing, it doesn't require any special database tables, and it doesn't require hours of user training.
It also doesn't have the possibilites of metadata.
// E23