Personally, I think the focus of this discussion on infoboxes is
short-sighted. My personal hope is that Wikidata will actually allow the
Wikipedias to use fewer infoboxes (and when they are used, for them to
be much smaller). This may sound counter-intuitive, but let me explain...
<opinionated rant>
Right now, English Wikipedia suffers from a continually growing plague
of infobox cruft. Most articles on Wikipedia now look more like Pokemon
cards than Encyclopedia articles. Compare:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft
The problem with infoboxes is that they are inherently unencyclopedic.
Infoboxes are for viewing data, not for giving a nuanced and
comprehensive overview of a subject. In fact they actually detract from
that goal. The infobox for George Washington leads me to believe that he
had equal allegiance to Britain and the U.S., that he was a Deist
Episcopal (which is quite misleading in its simplicity), and that his
role as President of the United States was just as important as his role
as Delegate to the Second Continental Congress from Virginia. Not to
mention the fact that it's nearly 3 pages long! Imagine an infobox like
that sitting in http://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington.
If we had a repository where people could put all the fact-cruft that
they want, they would probably be less tempted to spam the infoboxes
with it. And maybe at some point we could even replace infoboxes with a
"Data tab" or something similar that gave a full interface to the
Wikidata data, but without having it dominate the Wikipedia article (as
infoboxes do). I imagine that eventually the Wikidata content on many
subjects will exceed the Wikipedia content.
So my personal hope is that Wikidata will eventually allow us to think
outside the infobox. Heh, I think I'll make that my new slogan: "Think
outside the infobox!" Or maybe "Death to infoboxes! Long live Wikidata!" :)
</opinionated rant>
Disclaimer: I'm not directly involved with the Wikidata project, just an
interested onlooker.
Ryan Kaldari
On 7/10/12 6:01 PM, jmccl...@hypergrove.com wrote:
Hi Ryan,
Normal wiki rules of the road are about who can edit what
and when, not so much how, that I was referencing; I was responding to
the concern about "control".
You say: "Housing the infoboxes on
WikiData would be a terrible idea for several reasons:
* Every
Wikipedia does infoboxes differently depending on the policies and
conventions of that wiki (for example, on English Wikipedia we
strongly
discourage flag icons in infoboxes, while other wikis don't
care).
Reply: {{wikidata:en:infobox:Thomas Jefferson}} certainly can be
different in content & style from {{wikidata:de:infobox:Thomas
Jefferson}}, so the concern seems insubstantial to me. Noone is talking
about universal "policies & conventions".
* Infoboxes are only 1
possible use of WikiData. Other possibilities:
** Setting the birth and
death dates in the lead sentences of biographies
** Setting the
coordinates displayed on geography articles
Reply: You cite stable
unchanging data. But should the community considers the ability to
poll/re-poll/build/re-build constant data to be so important, then
create a transcludable page on wikidata to hold that information. Do a
{{subst:}} for that matter.
** Populating the interlanguage links
(already planned)
Reply: Again, another (important) transcludable
page.
So, I humbly continue to ask: why impose triples-level
client/server APIs on every wikipedia? What's being gained by such a
design?
Thanks in advance, John
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