On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 6:41 PM, Happy-melon happy-melon@live.com wrote:
Eh? I get the feeling that we're reading from totally different song sheets here. You seem to be saying here is that you expect the use case to be 'license templates on steroids': on the image description page, we have license templates that now emit microdata/RDF/the-metadata-format-of-the-month, which can be picked up by whoever is interested.
Right. We know that web spiders are interested in picking up this metadata automatically.
That's not MediaWiki doing anything active with the data, and it's absolutely no different from marking up infoboxes. In fact, the usecase for infoboxes is arguably stronger, because their data structure is more complicated and harder to machine-read otherwise.
I'm not clear what your analogy to infoboxes is about.
What I had assumed we meant by "MediaWiki do stuff with metadata" would be to pick up metadata about an image, and then output that **wherever the image is used**. So when you view an article with an image, that use of the image has a metadata cloud that describes where the image is from, what its license is, whatever.
Ah, I see. I don't think we want to do that. There's no end to the amount of metadata you could shove into a page in machine-readable format -- we'd be talking serious markup bloat here if you start adding things on the basis of "someone will surely find it useful". I wouldn't want to add any extra output on every page unless we had a known, concrete use for it.
That usecase is incredibly badly served by just allowing raw metadata in the image page wikitext; it's really no different to adding categories via a license template.
It's no different, except that RDFa/microdata are relatively standard, so third parties don't have to special-case MediaWiki and can use the same code to figure out licenses on all sites. That's the only advantage.
Again, I don't know which side of the coin you're talking about: switching the output format is trivial *iff* there's a disjoint between the input and output.
Well, the idea is you could accept microdata as input, and transform it into a different format for output if in the future you decided you didn't like microdata. So you could add the disjointness between input and output at a later date if it's needed then.