On 2015-04-02 8:44 PM, Brian Wolff wrote:
However there is clearly a desire to be able to identify a representitive image for an article. This need is exhibited across many websites including reddit, facebook, google plus, etc, but also our own site as noted by the page images extension for mobile. Its clear there are multiple parties that want to be able to accurately extract such information progmatically from any arbitrary website on the internet. I would argue supporting this use case is not a Wikipedia issue, but a MediaWiki issue.
We should research which meta data scheme is the most de-facto standard for declaring this sort of information (whether that be open graph or schema.org or something else) and implement it (and only 1. Implenting this 10 different ways would be silly).
Facebook exclusively supports Open Graph.
Google+ recommends schema.org microdata and uses Open Graph.
Twitter exclusively uses their proprietary Twitter cards markup ( <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" /> ...) and requires you to validate and submit your site for approval before they'll display cards.
Reddit uses embed.ly, which is supposed to support a variety of Open Graph, oEmbed, etc...
Bing uses schema.org and Open Graph but states that they "currently only [use] this information to enhance the visual display of search results of a limited number of publishers". Bing just uses everything it can, Microdata, Microformats, RDFa, etc...
Google uses schema.org in microdata, RDFa, and JSON-LD formats for rich data (I'm not sure if they bother with page level metadata at all, standard HTML title and meta description generally covers what they output).
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So my opinion would be to support Open Graph, optionally add some schema.org, and screw Twitter and their unwillingness to play nice with attempts to standardize metadata.
We should also consider oEmbed where it makes sense.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]