[Wikipedia-l] Simple XML ideas

[Jimmy Wales]

It would be very cute and maybe harmless to be able to mark up some articles
as being about people or events or whatever.  I'm not sure how this would best
be implemented, and maybe it shouldn't be implemented, but hear me out.  (I think
maybe namespaces aren't right for this idea, but then again, maybe so.)

Look at this text -- I'm not suggesting this as actual markup we should adopt, but
this is just something to get ideas flowing:

<person>George Washington</person> was the first <concept>President</concept> of
the <place>United States of America</place> after the adoption of the <concept>United
States Constitution</concept>.

The magic we could do if lots and lots of articles were marked up with this kind
of metadata would be really neat.

If we used namespaces, this would be:

[[George Washington]]

[[person:George Washington]]

But I think we should think really hard about the dangers of
proliferating namespaces too quickly.  One of the things we have to
think really hard about is making sure that any transition to more
comprensive semantic markup doesn't frighten and confuse people.


--Jimbo