Wikipedia:WikiProject Microformats

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[edit] Project aims

  • To encourage the deployment of microformats in Wikipedia
    • by marking-up templates
  • To share the resulting experience with other-language Wikipedias and other wiki- projects
    • by harmonizing metadata template formats across projects
    • by facilitating interwiki transfer of metadata between projects
  • To document microformats in the article space, to the best possible standards
  • To give feedback to the microformat community, so that microformats can be developed to best serve both Wikipedia and the wider on-line community
  • To encourage the deployment of microformats in the Wikimedia application
    • including (but not only) hCard in user profiles
  • To advocate for the use of microformats by partner projects, metadata consumers, etc.
    • by ensuring that templates are parsable in the wiki source code

[edit] What are microformats?

A Microformat (sometimes abbreviated μF or uF) is a way of adding simple semantic meaning to human-readable content which is otherwise, from a machine's point of view, just plain text. They allow data items such as events, contact details or locations, on HTML (or XHTML) web pages, to be meaningfully detected and the information in them to be extracted by software, and indexed, searched for, saved or cross-referenced, so that it can be reused or combined.

More technically, they are items of semantic mark up, using just standard (X)HTML with a set of common class-names. They are open and available, freely, for anyone to use.

For example, 52.48,-1.89 is a pair of numbers which may be understood, from their context, to be a set of geographic coordinates. By wrapping them in spans (or other HTML elements) with specific class names (in this case part of the geo microformat specification):

      <span class="geo"><span class="latitude">52.48</span>, <span class="longitude">-1.89</span></span>

machines can be told exactly what each value represents, and can then index it, look it up on a map, export it to a GPS device, or whatever.

Other microformats allow the encoding and extraction of events, contact information, social relationships, and so on. More are being developed.

Version 3 of the Firefox browser will[1][2], and version 8 of Internet Explorer may[3], include native support for microformats.

[edit] How can we use Microformats on Wikipedia?

(and, more generally, in MediaWiki)?

It is easier to apply them to templates rather than individual pages. That also means that individual authors need not know the intricacies of microformat mark-up, only how to use the relevant template. Many of the templates on Wikipedia require minimal changes, to use microformats to present their existing content with added meaning. While the functionality may already exist in the Wikipedia template, adding microformat mark-up will make that functionality available to people using the same tools they use when visiting other sites.

[edit] Project members

[edit] Button

Use {{User Microformats}} to show your participation in this project.

[edit] Banner

Put {{ProjectMicroformats}} on the talk page of relevant articles.

[edit] Meta templates

[edit] For articles

  • {{UF-coord-th}} - table header for columns of coordinates using {{coord}}.
  • {{kml}} - links to KML services for pages with multiple occurrences of Geo.

[edit] For talk pages

[edit] For templates

  • {{Infobox}} has built-in support for adding microformat classes to the infoboxes it generates

[edit] For template documentation

[edit] Categories

[edit] Parser functions

The following may be of use.

  • #time (in MediaWiki version 1.6 and higher)
    • Can change date formats around. For example, {{#time: c|10 June 2007}} produces 2007-06-10T00:00:00+00:00. The 'c' indicates that ISO8601 format should be used. A 'Y' instead of 'c' would return just the four digit year. However, this might run into trouble with the date parameter values on some templates. For instance, if a range (e.g. 1954-1955) were used in the date parameter {{#time: c|1954-1955}} would return Error: invalid time (per [1].

[edit] Related projects

[edit] Tasks

Volunteers needed!

[edit] Currently available

[edit] Geo

Geo (shortcut: WP:GEOUF) is for WGS84 coordinates (latitude;longitude).

Geo allows waypoints to be indexed ("find me all places within 2 km of X"), looked up on other websites, or uploaded to devices, such as GPS units.

{{coord}} applies the Geo microformat to coordinates on Wikipedia. It is is intended to replace the "coor" family of templates and simplify data entry.

See also:

[edit] Geo examples on Wikipedia

See: Category:Templates generating Geo

Examples:

[edit] Extensions

There are three active proposals, none mutually-exclusive, and all backwards-compatible, to extend the geo microformat:

[edit] Export to KML

Pages marked with {{coord}} can be exported as KML (for use in Google Earth, for example) via Brian Suda's site, in this format:

http://suda.co.uk/projects/microformats/geo/get-geo.php?type=kml&uri=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volcanoes_in_the_United_States_of_America

The same URL can be pasted into Google Maps as a search, and will show the locations, as push-pins on a map

The template: {{kml}} has been created for this purpose (and was immediately nominated for deletion!).

[edit] hCard

hCard is for contact details of people (both article subjects and user profiles), organisations and venues.

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Microformats/hcard for more.

[edit] hCalendar

hCalendar is for events - so that they can be added directly to calendar or diary programmes or websites. See Category:Templates generating hCalendars (note also Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries).


{{start date}} now emits the required ISO8601 date with class="dtstart", and {{end date}} emits thedate with class="dtend" (not yet working for exclusive whole-day dates).

[edit] hAtom

hAtom is for making feeds.

It will not be possible to use hAtom in Wikipedia until it is possible to have an address element on pages. See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#address_element.

{{start date}} now emits the required ISO8601 date with class="updated".

[edit] hReview

hReview is for marking up reviews, and could be used by, for example, Template:Infobox Album.

[edit] Other

[edit] Pseudo-microformats

Though not formally microformats (because they have not been developed using the "microformats process", and/ or involve hidden metadata), the following are related:

[edit] Under development

[edit] Species

The draft species microformat has been applied to the {{Taxobox}} template (with 37,140 examples as at the time of posting).

It is recognised by the Operator extension for Firefox (using an add-in user script, itself in development).

Wikipedia editors are invited to comment on or contribute to the development of this microformat, via Template talk:Taxobox#'Species' microformat, or the "microformats-new" mailing list.

"Species" will allow the disambiguation of common names, and the lookup of species in databases, recording software, etc. - and the look up from such sites or software, on Wikipedia.

[edit] Forthcoming

[edit] Citations

The proposed citation microformat will obviously be very relevant to Wikipedia, both for on-page citations and bibliographies, and for allowing people to cite Wikipedia, elsewhere. See Template talk:Cite book#Use in Bibliography and COinS in Wikipedia for work which is laying some of the groundwork for application of that microformat, once it is ready.

Citation microformats would allow the look-up of cited articles or books in libraries or shops, and the extraction of citation data for the page being voted, if it is to be cited elsewhere.

[edit] Currency

The proposed currency microformat may be useful, especially if the suggestion to include a date field for historical amounts is included., for example, on 1922 in Germany

  • "Despite the ending of cash payments for the rest of 1922, the main cause of Germany's inability to pay, the steady depreciation of the mark, was ongoing. Towards the end of the year it assumed a disastrous rapidity. On August 1, the US Dollar still stood at 643 Marks to the Dollar and the British Pound at 2,850 Marks to the Pound. But on September 5 the dollar had already risen to 1,440 Marks and the pound to 6,525 Marks, and in December the pound was worth between 30,000 and 40,000 marks and the dollar between 7,000 and 9,000."

Currency would allow automatic conversion of amounts into other currencies ("how much is that in dollars?") or time ("how much would that be today?")

[edit] Other MediaWiki uses

[edit] Wikitravel

Wikitravel is using microformats, not least in Wikitravel listings

[edit] MediaWiki issues

  • We need to be able to add classes to internal and external links, to generate, for example:
<a href="example.com" class="xxx">

or:

<a href="example.com" rel="yyy">

or a combination of both, where "xxx" is a valid microformat attribute such as "url" and "yyy" is a valid rel attribute such as "directory", "tag" or "colleague" (the latter from XFN).

For other issues encountered when adding microformats to Wikipedia and other pages, using Media Wiki mark-up, see [2]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Resig, John (2007-02-01). Microformats in Firefox 3. Retrieved on 2007-03-25.
  2. ^ Kaply, Mike (2007-05-09). Microformats and Firefox 3 (for Developers). Retrieved on 2007-05-23.
  3. ^ Bounds, Darren (2007-05-02). Microsoft drops hints about Internet Explorer 8. Retrieved on 2007-05-02.
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