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