[Commons-l] Alternate information templates Was: Image description grammar (was: the great {{information}} campaign)

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 9/6/07, Platonides <Platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
> Agree. We don't need to have ONE template on ALL images, we can (and
> should) have a number of templates, as long as it's documented. Ie. we
> have a page listing all of "valid" templates and describing its
> arguments. If a bot knows that Information_Louvre->source is equivalent
> to Information->Author it can happily work with any of them being
> present. Just keep it documented (and a working parsing implementation).
>
> Another example are PD books templates. They have everything about the
> image "Page X from book Y, by Foo on Year on public domain". Here the
> source & author values for the template would be hardcoded.

The problem that comes up is that people just constantly invent new
templates often with trivial differences like hard-coded sources,
authorship, or licensing information. These are especially bad cases
because when it's stuffed into the template it is as though it isn't
provided at all.. until someone goes through and special-cases that
template. Eventually we'll end up with 10million images and 1 million
templates, one for each source.. just because our uploading tools suck
and people are abusing templates to avoid retyping source or licensing
info. :-/

It's utterly unacceptable to expect any tools to keep up with that.

Most of the fields in information are common to virtually every image
why should someone have to support 40 different ways of reading the
same three or four basic pieces of information which are common to all
images? Why should the same basic three or four fields have a
different presentation randomly on some images?

It would be better to add lots of optional arguments to information..
or offer secondary additional information templates which have less
uniformity but more flexibility.