[WikiEN-l] Why infoboxes are good

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 2:52 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/01/27/extracting-wikipedia-infoboxes-values-from-text/

Some infoboxes are designed for that sort of thing, some aren't. Some
have footnotes for example, and lots of flexibility, which makes it
harder, but not impossible, to parse the data. And some projects (for
good reason) still virulently reject infoboxes, mainly because people
who don't understand a particular subject try to force simplified
statements (i.e. sentences, not words or numbers) inside an infobox,
and lose nuance and context in the process, devaluing the article as a
whole (reading the full text is ultimately more educational).

And not all such data is in infoboxes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Metadata

Something I tried to improve, which still needs expansion and TLC.

Some areas of data are in separate templates (not infobox templates)
and some are in categories.

I'd like to add some of the data-heavy infoboxes to that list, like
the ones in maths, physics, astronomy, geography, geology and
chemistry, and the other 'hard' sciences. Are any of those infoboxes
organised for the extraction of data the way the geographical co-ords
templates are?

Carcharoth