"LA" == Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se> writes:
LA> You have to provide some incentive for the editor of an
LA> article to input the metadata. How are you going to succeed
LA> in attracting wikipedia article editors?
That's a worthwhile question. Here's some possible answers:
* Automatic indices. Use metadata to automatically create indices to
the encyclopedia, like [[list of X]]. We could probably also do some
fun automatic stuff with the timeline and date pages.
[[meta:year=1885,born]]
[[meta:year=1923,died]]
* Metadata-guided search. Currently we have three levels of search:
exact title (the "Go" button), title match, and full-text match. I'd
say that a metadata search (probably placed, in order of value,
between exact title and title match) would be helpful. We could
leave it on (like "Go") even when full-text search was too
compute-intensive.
* Metadata in search results: even for full-text search, it can be
useful to return metadata. Like, if I search for "Springfield", it'd
be kind of nice to see:
- Springfield
is-a: city, is-part-of: Kentucky
(matching text here)
- Springfield
is-a: city, is-part-of: Missouri
(matching text here)
- Springfield
is-a: fictional city, genre: animation
(matching text here)
Yes, the presentation is lame -- I don't think we'd ever show raw
tags like that. But you get the picture.
* Geographical proximity. Frankly, I think ICBM tags make the whole
thing worthwhile, just on their own. But that's my own bete noire.
* Breadcrumb navigation. It's fairly cumbersome to write, in
[[cyclotron]], that "A cyclotron is an [[instrument]] used in
[[particle physics]] which is a branch of [[physics]] which in turn
is a [[natural science]] which is a kind of [[science]]." After all,
the article isn't about natural science -- why describe it from
here?
But with metadata we could have a breadcrumb link thing that says:
sciences > natural sciences > physics > particle physics > instruments
Frankly, what I think is that we just need to have one or two
applications of the metadata, and people are going to think up
brilliant new ones. They'll send patches for MediaWiki to do it, or
they'll send RFEs, or they'll develop their own bots or whatever.
In other words, I don't think we're going to need to worry about
getting people into doing metadata; we're going to have to worry about
keeping up!
~ESP