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.
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.
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.
Again, I don't know which side of the coin
you're talking about: switching
the output format is trivial *iff* there's a disjoint between the input and
output.
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.