Personally, I think the focus of this discussion on infoboxes is short-sighted. My personal hope is that Wikidata will actually allow the Wikipedias to use fewer infoboxes (and when they are used, for them to be much smaller). This may sound counter-intuitive, but let me explain...
<opinionated rant> Right now, English Wikipedia suffers from a continually growing plague of infobox cruft. Most articles on Wikipedia now look more like Pokemon cards than Encyclopedia articles. Compare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft The problem with infoboxes is that they are inherently unencyclopedic. Infoboxes are for viewing data, not for giving a nuanced and comprehensive overview of a subject. In fact they actually detract from that goal. The infobox for George Washington leads me to believe that he had equal allegiance to Britain and the U.S., that he was a Deist Episcopal (which is quite misleading in its simplicity), and that his role as President of the United States was just as important as his role as Delegate to the Second Continental Congress from Virginia. Not to mention the fact that it's nearly 3 pages long! Imagine an infobox like that sitting in http://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington.
If we had a repository where people could put all the fact-cruft that they want, they would probably be less tempted to spam the infoboxes with it. And maybe at some point we could even replace infoboxes with a "Data tab" or something similar that gave a full interface to the Wikidata data, but without having it dominate the Wikipedia article (as infoboxes do). I imagine that eventually the Wikidata content on many subjects will exceed the Wikipedia content.
So my personal hope is that Wikidata will eventually allow us to think outside the infobox. Heh, I think I'll make that my new slogan: "Think outside the infobox!" Or maybe "Death to infoboxes! Long live Wikidata!" :) </opinionated rant>
Disclaimer: I'm not directly involved with the Wikidata project, just an interested onlooker.
Ryan Kaldari
On 7/10/12 6:01 PM, jmcclure@hypergrove.com wrote:
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
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