"LA" == Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se writes:
LA> In the wiki world, the article on Angola does not contain any LA> formalized, hierarchical metadata markup such as [[part LA> of:Africa]] or [[borders:Namibia]], but instead the plain LA> English phrase "Angola is a country in southwestern LA> [[Africa]], bordering [[Namibia]]". That's what wiki LA> contributors can learn and be made to use. It doesn't require LA> more complex parsing, it doesn't require any special database LA> tables, and it doesn't require hours of user training.
Some responses off the top of my head:
* I think it might have be useful to back away from the politically-loaded use of metadata and just concentrate on the definition I gave. Metadata doesn't have to be for the Semantic Web or some remote librarians; it can be useful for inhouse stuff.
I'm not particularly interested in the Semantic Web. I think Dublin Core is cool, but I think most of the Dublin Core data tags could be determined from the metadata (contributors, timestamps, license, etc.) we have now. So, this isn't really a Semantic Web/Dublin Core/yadda yadda issue.
* There _are_, in fact, systems using <meta> tags, although Wikitext metadata doesn't need to be rendered as <meta>. For example, GeoURL (http://geourl.org/) uses ICBM <meta> tags, which is pretty cool.
* Full-text search -- the Google approach -- is fine, but it sure does whack Wikipedia hard. It's disabled now. Some metadata-based navigation could be useful to offload some of the burden from full-text search.
* Wikipedia contributors do metadata markup now -- with Interlanguage tags. It's not unprecedented. It's not particularly hard.
* It should be obvious from the high number of [[list of X]] pages in Wikipedia that Wikipedia contributors think about categories and other metadata.
* 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.
I guess my point is that metadata isn't necessarily bad, authoritarian, or evil. It can make projects using MediaWiki more useful.
~ESP