User:Filceolaire

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Draft comment:

Option 1 Free form meta-data. Enter it once use it everywhere.

This is the model adopted by the Semantic Mediawiki software. A ‘Type’ label can be added to items of information in the article (Attributes) and to links between articles (Relationships). This can be read by a specialist search engine to automatically produce info boxes on the page and to produce specialist search pages – e.g. All cities with population over 3 300 401, all female physicists with red hair.

Advantages:

  • information is entered only once.

Disadvantages

  • Information is entered in encyclopedia articles so it is hard to reuse in other language encyclopedias (which is the master encyclopedia).
  • It is difficult to annotate information with sources (who said that’s the population), time (when did it have that population?).

Option 2 – Wiki infobase. A collection of structured data in a separate shared repository accessible to all wikipedias

This is the model adopted by the Wikidata software.

Advantages

  1. Information is accessible to all wikipedias, even the smallest, in their native language.
  2. editing rules can be tighter (every fact needs a source) than for wikipedias in other languages.
  3. information can be harvested from infoboxes (though this conflicts with the item above)
  4. Information must be reentered by hand in the body of the article, encouraging editors to consider if some commentary is required.

Disadvantages

  1. Information must be entered by hand in the body of the article.