On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 6:41 PM, Happy-melon <[email protected]> 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.

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