David Gerard wrote:
On 06/04/2008, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Semantic MediaWiki is basically everything that's horrible about templates, but you can query the data in the parameters. :)
Alas, that may mean it's a bit at odds with the wysiwyg ideal of 'hide those awful templates'.
To the extent that templates are things like infoboxes, those *can* be sensible separated from body text and handled easily. To the extent that references, formatting, and data relations are extensively embedded *into* body text, that's where things get a bit ugly.
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)