"Aryeh Gregor" <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote in message
news:7c2a12e21001181612t84d5c90kc16ccc8724ca5b72@mail.gmail.com...
On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 6:41 PM, Happy-melon
<happy-melon(a)live.com> wrote:
Eh? I get the feeling that we're reading
from totally different song
sheets
here. You seem to be saying here is that you expect the use case to be
'license templates on steroids': on the image description page, we have
license templates that now emit
microdata/RDF/the-metadata-format-of-the-month, which can be picked up by
whoever is interested.
Right. We know that web spiders are interested in picking up this
metadata automatically.
That's not MediaWiki doing anything active
with the
data, and it's absolutely no different from marking up infoboxes. In
fact,
the usecase for infoboxes is arguably stronger, because their data
structure
is more complicated and harder to machine-read otherwise.
I'm not clear what your analogy to infoboxes is about.
I was saying that license templates are significantly easier to machine-read
than infoboxes, because their data is simpler. The ultimate goal is, as you
say, to allow machine reading without bespoke parsing, but that's a long way
down the line.
What I had assumed we meant by "MediaWiki do
stuff with metadata" would
be
to pick up metadata about an image, and then output that **wherever the
image is used**. So when you view an article with an image, that use of
the
image has a metadata cloud that describes where the image is from, what
its
license is, whatever.
Ah, I see. I don't think we want to do that. There's no end to the
amount of metadata you could shove into a page in machine-readable
format -- we'd be talking serious markup bloat here if you start
adding things on the basis of "someone will surely find it useful". I
wouldn't want to add any extra output on every page unless we had a
known, concrete use for it.
At least we now *know* we're talking about different things :-D I agree
there are gradations of what is 'worth' putting into the markup; although
""adding things on the basis of 'someone will surely find it
useful'"" is
**exactly** what we will get if we allow the busy bee template developers
access to a metadata markup, almost by definition. I would say it's
definitely 'worth' exposing license metadata on every use of an image; the
status of a page's images affects our whole terms of use, whether we can say
"yes you can use all this in this fashion" verses "you have to jump through
these hoops for these images because they're different". Author, location,
capture date; yes these probably aren't 'worth' the cost of exposing on
pages. But being able to search commons for all photos taken in Berlin
between 1989 and 1991 would be worth its weight in gold.
That usecase is incredibly badly served by just
allowing raw metadata in
the
image page wikitext; it's really no different to adding categories via a
license template.
It's no different, except that RDFa/microdata are relatively standard,
so third parties don't have to special-case MediaWiki and can use the
same code to figure out licenses on all sites. That's the only
advantage.
...
Well, the idea is you could accept microdata as input,
and transform
it into a different format for output if in the future you decided you
didn't like microdata. So you could add the disjointness between
input and output at a later date if it's needed then.
Indeed, but that's data *output*, not input. Currently our categories are
input via [[Category:Foo]] and output via some HTML at the bottom of the
page, but also via the API in a variety of formats; people use both methods
to extract the metadata. Once MW knows what data an object has, how it
outputs that data back is totally open as you say. So given that a
translation into a format that MW understands is desirable for its own sake,
and that from there it's trivial to translate back into whatever output
format(s) the current web demands, why would we choose an input format like
<span
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/StillImage" property="dc:title"
rel="dc:type">EmeryMolyneux-terrestrialglobe-1592-20061127.jpg</span>
by <span
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
href="#mw-image"
property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL">Bob
Smith</span>
is licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/">Creat…
Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License</a>
Rather than an input format like [[License::CC-BY-SA-3.0]]??
--HM