Evan Prodromou wrote:
Anyways, I wanted to float a design idea for inclusion of metadata in MediaWiki articles. None of this is particularly new, and it seems like most has been suggested at one point or another.
While your definition of metadata is correct, and in full correspondence with every other definition, you fail to mention that there is also a "metadata movement" that has sprung up in the last ten years, as a reaction against the Internet, primarily among librarians. Today this movement is centered around Stu Weibel's "Dublin Core" metadata initiative at the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) in Dublin, Ohio, http://www.dublincore.org/
The background was that librarians thought highly about themselves and considered the freedom of the Internet as a dirty "chaos" and a threat to their professionalism as information specialists. The Internet (i.e. the World Wide Web) was characterized as "the world's biggest library with a drunken librarian after an earthquake", or something like this. In this community, hierarchical web indexes such as the commercial Yahoo or the non-commercial Dmoz were welcomed, but considered insufficient. Full text search engines such as Altavista and Google were considered as barbaric failures. The library catalog was the ideal, and "metadata" was the promised solution. If they could only teach all website creators to become librarians and "mark" their web pages with "metadata" corresponding to what's found on a library catalog card, order would form out of the previous chaos.
Ten years later, of course, we know that non-hierarchical solutions such as Google and Wikipedia are the winners. Data and metadata are presented in-line, without separation. This is what works, and what people tend to use. There are no useful global metadata search engines, and website maintainers don't include structured (Dublin Core) and honest metadata in their web pages. On the contrary, the "meta" HTML tag is most often used for dishonest "spamdexing".
In the wiki world, the article on Angola does not contain any formalized, hierarchical metadata markup such as [[part of:Africa]] or [[borders:Namibia]], but instead the plain English phrase "Angola is a country in southwestern [[Africa]], bordering [[Namibia]]". That's what wiki contributors can learn and be made to use. It doesn't require more complex parsing, it doesn't require any special database tables, and it doesn't require hours of user training.