[WikiEN-l] Category destruction

[cohesion]

On 5/4/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 04/05/07, Earle Martin <wikipedia at downlode.org> wrote:
>
> > I guess this is a roundabout way of saying I don't think this will be
> > worked out until we get Semantic MediaWiki.
>
>
> Until we come up with a Semantic MediaWiki syntax that's intuitively
> usable by mere mortals.


I don't buy this.

First, this is the syntax:

George Washington was an [[nationality::American]] President.

That is usable by a good number of people. Secondly, that example is
doing it the hard way. The current infoboxes could be changed so that
they include this information when the user uses them in exactly the
same way they do now. Currently the article [[George Washington]] has
a line in the infobox

| nationality=American

This could remain exactly the same and have the template changed to
include this as a semantic statement.

My biggest objection is that we should wait until things are easy in
general. Not everything has to be easy. Not everyone has to worry
about the semantic aspects at all. It we waited until parserfunctions
were easy to use would we have the super useful templates we have
today? I don't care if a new user can edit [[Template:Backlognav]] it
is useful regardless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Backlognav&action=edit
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Coord/input/dec&action=edit

Templates using semantic mediawiki would be drastically less
complicated than many of the templates using parserfunctions we use
today. If the servers can't handle the increased load that some of the
queries might have that's one thing, and maybe we should think about
disabling that aspect, but assuming everything has to be dead simple
before it can be useful holds up progress.

Judson
[[:en:User:Cohesion]]