Hi,
There have been a lot of mails since I last had the the time to reply, so I'll reply to some points in a single mail.
On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 9:04 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
An internally handled parser function doesn't conflict with showing it as a textbox.
We could for instance store it as a hidden page prefix.
No. I strongly feel that using the wikitext to store hidden metadata is a bad idea. See HM's reply later in the thread.
Eeewwwwww....
What's any different between this and a {{#author: }} parser function apart from the inability to access it from the wikitext? As noted, it's perfectly possible for the data to be in a separate field on the upload form, either by default or by per-wiki hackery. This is likely to result in as many "why can't I edit the bits of wikitext which diff, history, transclusion (let's not forget the enormous can of worms mucking around with the wikitext will open up there), etc assure me is there??" questions as it solves "what does this brace structure do?" ones.
--HM
PS: The field author would be just a pointer to the author page, so you wouldn't need to edit everything on any case.
A good point, {{#fileauthor:}} could indeed just point to the a page in the Author: namespace.
Now that I think of it, if we go this way, there is no reason to restrict this licensing information to Files.
On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 1:38 AM, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
Things like {{#author:4}} seem to be a nice hack to Get Things Done (TM). As was mentioned before, the temptation is great to expand it into a generic triplet storage a la Semantic MediaWiki, but that would probably complicate things to an extend where nothing gets done, again.
SMW may perhaps be the ultimate solution, but I do not believe that activation of SMW is going to happen in the near or mid term feature, and indeed waiting for SMW will probably mean that nothing is going to happen.
I think the consensus is that we want to store the copyright metadata in the wikitext and not separately.
The biggest problem is how to define "second-level" properties. For example, a file has a license, say GFDL-1.2 and the license in turn has a legal URL such as http://fsf.org/gfdl-1.2 or something. This could be solved by {{#filelicense:GFDL-1.2}} pointing to a license defined in Special:LicenseManger, with all its properties there. Another solution would be to define a new namespace such as License: and have the properties defined in there somehow. The same problem applies to authors as well of course.
Regards, Bryan