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

[David Gerard]

Reply to reply.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
Date: 6 Apr 2008 23:04
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Random "how the world feels" from London PM
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>


On 06/04/2008, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
 > On 06/04/2008, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:


>  >  * They really want machine-readability from Wikipedia. The infobox
 >  >  templates on Wikipedia are getting there. Mostly what they need is
 >  >  standardisation (is the image called "image", "Image" or "Img"?), and
 >  >  a base template that's {{Persondata}} or a reasonable approximation.
 >  >  This is a matter of parser-functions in the template wikitext on the
 >  >  'pedia, but it's something someone needs to take on as a project: to
 >  >  re-plumb the templates without breaking the nice exposed external
 >  >  interface. Who knows parser-function code and is feeling ambitious and
 >  >  patient?

 > Is it worth getting Wikipedia to use Semantic MediaWiki? It would
 >  allow for much more powerful machine-readability than templates, but
 >  probably has hundreds of obstacles to trip over to get there.



Template standardisation struck me as a *feasible* way to the same
 thing. It has the advantage that consistency would appeal to the sort
 of geek who's happy to code parser-functions. And users are fine with
 templates taking parameters and hiding the horrible plumbing behind a
 nice interface.

 The big problem I can see with Semantic MediaWiki is that it involves
 horrible new wikitext syntax ... although if that can be hidden inside
 the template code, all the better.



 - d.