[WikiEN-l] Avoiding the dates issue

[Steve Summit]

Carcharoth wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 11:52 PM, Marc Riddell
> <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>> This is one of five different ways the Birth & Death dates are now being
>> represented in the Project.
>
> There is a similar profusion of different methods of dealing with
> biographical metadata...
> That is more concerning to me than inconsistent style.
>
> What should happen is that the basic biographical data, with sources,
> should be entered *once* and then reused in the various locations
> where it is needed...
>
> Anyone have any ideas how to set up a system like that cleanly and get
> it working on Wikipedia? The relatively poor spread of Persondata
> suggests that it is harder than it looks to get something like this
> going.

There've been lots and lots of proposals to add explicit support
for metadata within mediawiki.  It's too bad none of them have
gained any traction in the mainstream.

The approach I'd love to see would involve a table of name/value
pairs associated with each page.  There would be a separate
interface on the edit page to display and edit these values.
Values could be referred to anywhere on a page (including in
infoboxes) using template-like syntax, probably {{{name}}}
(i.e. just like template parameters).

Everything that, currently, is typically specified in infobox
arguments would be moved to the page's name/value list.
Infoboxes would be rewritten to use the enclosing page's named
values instead of its own explicit parameters, and the infobox
invocation would become drastically simpler.  The editing
interface for a page's name/value pairs could be made nicely
user-friendly, removing a standard complaint about current
infobox usage.

No functionality would be lost, much functionality would be
gained, and everything would become much cleaner and easier.
(IMO.)  Someone could (and would) implement SQL-like queries on
page data, letting you search Wikipedia for all pianists born in
odd-numbered years and with names beginning with "P".

(Disclaimer: this certainly isn't my idea; see e.g. 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Field-value_pairs .)