[Wikipedia-l] Infoboxes doubts

[Yury Tarasievich]

On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 02:01:22 +0200, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:

> Gustavo García wrote:
>
>> * Infoboxes could use some kind of hierarchy to avoid naming
>>   differently the same concept.  For ex. president.birth_date or
>>   Musical_Artist.Born could inherit from Person and reuse
>>   Person.birth_date to avoid inconsistencies.
>
> Nice thinking, but this is very unlikely to happen.  Infoboxes and
> similar templates are created spontaneously by people who are more
> interested (and knowledgeable) in 19th century poets or vintage
> cars than in data structures.  Your kind of structuring would send
> them to programming classes before they can start to document
> vintage cars and that would kill off their enthusiasm.

IMO, the only viable way to process such kind of structures would be to update the fields of identified semantics *in* the templates from some sort of language-neutral database, filled and verified separately. Or make that Wikidata, or whatever. Which ought to be reasonably welldeveloped and to work smoothly beforehand.

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