"LA" == Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se writes:
LA> You have to provide some incentive for the editor of an LA> article to input the metadata. How are you going to succeed LA> in attracting wikipedia article editors?
That's a worthwhile question. Here's some possible answers:
* Automatic indices. Use metadata to automatically create indices to the encyclopedia, like [[list of X]]. We could probably also do some fun automatic stuff with the timeline and date pages.
[[meta:year=1885,born]] [[meta:year=1923,died]]
* Metadata-guided search. Currently we have three levels of search: exact title (the "Go" button), title match, and full-text match. I'd say that a metadata search (probably placed, in order of value, between exact title and title match) would be helpful. We could leave it on (like "Go") even when full-text search was too compute-intensive.
* Metadata in search results: even for full-text search, it can be useful to return metadata. Like, if I search for "Springfield", it'd be kind of nice to see:
- Springfield is-a: city, is-part-of: Kentucky
(matching text here)
- Springfield is-a: city, is-part-of: Missouri
(matching text here)
- Springfield is-a: fictional city, genre: animation
(matching text here)
Yes, the presentation is lame -- I don't think we'd ever show raw tags like that. But you get the picture.
* Geographical proximity. Frankly, I think ICBM tags make the whole thing worthwhile, just on their own. But that's my own bete noire.
* Breadcrumb navigation. It's fairly cumbersome to write, in [[cyclotron]], that "A cyclotron is an [[instrument]] used in [[particle physics]] which is a branch of [[physics]] which in turn is a [[natural science]] which is a kind of [[science]]." After all, the article isn't about natural science -- why describe it from here?
But with metadata we could have a breadcrumb link thing that says:
sciences > natural sciences > physics > particle physics > instruments
Frankly, what I think is that we just need to have one or two applications of the metadata, and people are going to think up brilliant new ones. They'll send patches for MediaWiki to do it, or they'll send RFEs, or they'll develop their own bots or whatever.
In other words, I don't think we're going to need to worry about getting people into doing metadata; we're going to have to worry about keeping up!
~ESP