David Gerard wrote:
On 06/04/2008, Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Is it worth getting Wikipedia to use Semantic
MediaWiki? It would
allow for much more powerful machine-readability than templates, but
probably has hundreds of obstacles to trip over to get there.
Template standardisation struck me as a *feasible* way to the same
thing. It has the advantage that consistency would appeal to the sort
of geek who's happy to code parser-functions. And users are fine with
templates taking parameters and hiding the horrible plumbing behind a
nice interface.
The big problem I can see with Semantic MediaWiki is that it involves
horrible new wikitext syntax ... although if that can be hidden inside
the template code, all the better.
Semantic MediaWiki is basically everything that's horrible about
templates, but you can query the data in the parameters. :)
Alas, that may mean it's a bit at odds with the wysiwyg ideal of 'hide
those awful templates'.
To the extent that templates are things like infoboxes, those *can* be
sensible separated from body text and handled easily. To the extent that
references, formatting, and data relations are extensively embedded
*into* body text, that's where things get a bit ugly.
-- brion vibber (brion @
wikimedia.org)