Hi Brian!
I like the idea of a metadata API very much. Being able to just replace the
scraping backend with Wikidata (as proposed) later seems a good idea. I see no
downside as long as no extra work needs to be done on the templates and
wikitext, and the API could even be used later to port information from
templates to wikidata.
The only thing I'm slightly worried about is the data model and representation
of the metadata. Swapping one backend for another will only work if they are
conceptually compatible.
Can you give a brief overview of how you imagine the output of the API would be
structured, and what information it would contain?
Also, your original proposal said something about outputting HTML. That confuses
me - an API module would return structured data, why would you use HTML to
represent the metadata? That makes it a lot harder to process...
-- daniel
Am 04.09.2013 18:55, schrieb Brian Wolff:
On 8/31/13, James Forrester <jforres...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
However, how much more work would it be to insert it directly into Wikidata
right now? I worry about doing the work twice if Wikidata could take it now
- presumably the hard work is the reliable screen-scraping, and building
the tool-chain to extract from this just to port it over to Wikidata in a
few months' time would be a pity.
Part of this is meant as a hold over, until Wikidata solves the
problem in a more flexible way. However, part of it is meant to still
work with wikidata. The idea I have is that this api could be used by
any wiki (the base part is in core), and then various extensions can
extend it. That way we can make extensions (or even core features)
relying on this metadata that can work even on wikis without
wikidata/or the commons meta extension I started. The basic features
of the api would be available for anyone who needed metadata, and it
would return the best information available, even if that means only
the exif data. It would also mean that getting the metadata would be
independent of the backend used to extract/get the metadata. (I would
of course still expect wikidata to introduce its own more flexible
APIs).
This looks rather fun. For VisualEditor, we'd quite like to be able to
pull in the description of a media file in the page's language when it's
inserted into the page, to use as the default caption for images. I was
assuming we'd have to wait for the port of this data to Wikidata, but this
would be hugely helpful ahead of that. :-)
Interesting.
[tangent]
One idea that sometimes comes up related to this, is a way of
specifying default thumbnail parameters on the image description page.
For example, on pdfs, sometimes people want to specify a default page
number. Often its proposed to be able to specify a default alt text
(although some argue that would be bad for accessibility since alt
text should be context dependent). Another use, is sometimes people
propose having a sharpen/no-sharpen parameter to control if sharpening
of thumbnails should take place (photos should be sharpened, line art
should not be. Currently we do it based on file type).
It could be interesting to have a magic word like
{{#imageParameters:page=3|Description|alt=Alt text}} on the image
description page, to specify defaults. (Although I imagine the visual
editor folks don't like the idea of adding more in-page metadata).
[end not entirely fully thought out tangent]
-
--bawolff
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
