Andrew Lih
The problem is it is inherently non-Wiki. My hunch is that it would
severely affect the nature of Wikipedia. The beauty of Wikipedia and
wikis is that humans and the evolving community are in control. Not a
process and not some imposed database template. (Clay Shirky has an
excellent view on this.) If someone creating an article wants to do
tables in a particular way, or wants a different disambiguation message,
or a unique take on doing a timeline, s/he's completely open to it.
Jiang and Tannin can battle over which way to write up Australia, and in
the end they agree, and a better template comes out. I'm nearly
convinced it's why 1) people feel empowered by Wikis, 2) people stay
around in the community and 3) good ideas evolve so quickly.
I say I'm nearly convinced, because in the end, it seems that something
beyond hand-editing everything *has* to evolve. But does it? I'm not
sure. When does this merry go round stop? :) Perhaps that's what's so
challenging about the "1.0" project. I'd love to hear ideas on this.
I agree with Andrew wholeheartedly. Moreover, my greatest concerns are not
so much the wasted time (hand editing) and wasted disk space but rather the
search capabilities. I think that it is important as wikipedia grows that a
sophisticated search engine is available. My opinion is just that meta date
makes searching easier. I am open to other suggestions though. Who knows,
maybe we will have smarter algorithms in the future which can interpret and
analyse text like humans, that would solve a lot of the discussed problems
:-)
Cheers,
Jurriaan