Hi Ryan,
Normal wiki rules of the road are about who can edit what
and when, not so much how, that I was referencing; I was responding to
the concern about "control".
You say: "Housing the infoboxes on
WikiData would be a terrible idea for several reasons:
* Every
Wikipedia does infoboxes differently depending on the policies and
conventions of that wiki (for example, on English Wikipedia we
strongly
discourage flag icons in infoboxes, while other wikis don't
care).
Reply: {{wikidata:en:infobox:Thomas Jefferson}} certainly can be
different in content & style from {{wikidata:de:infobox:Thomas
Jefferson}}, so the concern seems insubstantial to me. Noone is talking
about universal "policies & conventions".
* Infoboxes are only 1
possible use of WikiData. Other possibilities:
** Setting the birth and
death dates in the lead sentences of biographies
** Setting the
coordinates displayed on geography articles
Reply: You cite stable
unchanging data. But should the community considers the ability to
poll/re-poll/build/re-build constant data to be so important, then
create a transcludable page on wikidata to hold that information. Do a
{{subst:}} for that matter.
** Populating the interlanguage links
(already planned)
Reply: Again, another (important) transcludable
page.
So, I humbly continue to ask: why impose triples-level
client/server APIs on every wikipedia? What's being gained by such a
design?
Thanks in advance, John