Evan Prodromou wrote:
* Providing metadata makes our data more useful to downstream users. For example, consider if someone wanted to take Wikipedia's prodigious collection of information about science fiction and fantasy and produce an encyclopedia out of it. Metadata could help them do it.
You have to provide some incentive for the editor of an article to input the metadata. This is where Dublin Core utterly fails to attract followers among website maintainers. How are you going to succeed in attracting wikipedia article editors?
If I edit [[Jules Verne]] and input [[fr:Jules Verne]] I get the instant reward of a working link to the French article about the same person, which is sufficient motivation for my adding this markup.
But what immediate reward do I get for inputing something like [[genre:science fiction]]? If all I get is a link to the page [[science fiction]], then I already got that from mentioning in plain text that "Jules Verne was an early writer of [[science fiction]]". So what extra benefit is entering the metadata going to give me?