On Sat, Jun 03, 2006 at 09:19:28AM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
On 6/3/06, Jens Frank jf@mormo.org wrote:
The additional changes to the syntax needed for Semantic Mediawiki would make the syntax even more difficult to understand, especially for people who are not aware of semantic markup. Things like
San Diego is a [[is a::city]]. It has a population of [[population:=1300000]].are not very intuitive any more. Good ideas how to hide the complexity from newbies would be very welcome.
The two specific examples you give could be handled by rigorous use of categories and infoboxes respectively. If all cities belonged to a subcategory of Category:Cities, and all cities had an infobox derived from some {{City infobox}} with a "population" parameter, you would have some "semantic markup" for nothing.
The category is of only limited use the way it's currently implemented. There is no efficient way to find the sub/supercategory relationships.
And the {{city infoboxes}} aren't a usability improvement at all. Their syntax is even worse. And of course we could put all the information into city infoboxes, but then we could stop writing articles and just create tables. There is more information about a city then the infobox. [[discovered by::Columbus]], [[founded by::Caesar]], [[conquered by::William II.]], ...
Regards,
jens