On 01/22/2011 08:15 PM, Bryan Tong Minh wrote:
Having a clear separate input text field "Author: ____" is much more user friendly {{#fileauthor:}}, which is so to say, a type of obscure MediaWiki jargon.
I disagree. In real life, there are always more compliated cases, where an author is not an author, but two authors or a sculptor, or one painter and one photographer. These things never fit in a single "author" field, and the same goes for any other separated fields. But the free-form Wikipedia can handle all real-world cases in plain human language.
Various "expert systems" based on "artificial intelligence" existed since the 1980s, but none of them produced a universal encyclopedia. Only the text-based Wikipedia did. After this humiliating fact, the same AI people (now dressed as "semantic web" scholars) come and claim that they too could have built Wikipedia, if it only were more structured. They are wrong, of course. Lack of structure is precisely what built Wikipedia.