[WikiEN-l] [Wikitech-l] Random "how the world feels" from London PM

[David Gerard]

On 07/04/2008, Brion Vibber <brion at wikimedia.org> wrote:

>  Alas, that may mean it's a bit at odds with the wysiwyg ideal of 'hide
>  those awful templates'.
>  To the extent that templates are things like infoboxes, those *can* be
>  sensible separated from body text and handled easily. To the extent that
>  references, formatting, and data relations are extensively embedded
>  *into* body text, that's where things get a bit ugly.


Yeah. When I say "templates" above, I meant "infoboxes" - which I
wasn't much of a fan of until it clicked that they were in fact
machine-readable information. (Presumably for the Opera project and
suchlike, we can have a "display=no" parameter.) References are a
whole other spitball of sheer joy ...

Infoboxes are a start on machine readability. Some short articles, the
entire content can basically be encoded in the infobox. If only RamBot
had done that for US places in 2003.

I suppose I should cc large chunks of this thread to wikien-l, this is
really the technical end of "editorial".


- d.