make the info box info and the info box itself easily exportable / importable. Wikipedia will probably never have an infobase of every CD, movie, book, video game but wikipedia data would be a useful strat for such a collection.

making the forms easy for people to use on their own site. If an author puts up infoboxes for herself and her books on her site that is then easy for us (or Google) to import.

LOCALISATION
Make localisation possible in languages which don’t have their own wikipedias. Think how happy the conservapedians will be when they can have personal info boxes with headings for “Christian Name” and “Surname” and dates AD and BC.

Infoboxes would be much better way to structure this information.

Suggestions:
INTERNATIONALISATION
I would like the info box info stored in Commons or a new Infobase and imported into the articles in every language. With a minimum of infobox Localisation any small wikipedia can make all the info in the infobase available (and editable) in their language.

INFOBOXES FOR NON-NOTABLES
The compromise that the Deletionists and the Inclusionists have arrived at is that where characters are not-notable in themselves they can still be included in an ‘also starring’ list/summary page. This means we lose the one to one correspondence between the page and the person which Semantic Media Wiki depends on. (SMW triples are actually doubles in the form
“The subject of this page IS CAPITAL OF [[Germany]]”)

MAKE WIKISPECIES A PILOT PROJECT
Wikispecies could be a pilot for the Infobase. At the moment (so I’ve been told0 the info in Wikispecies is less complete than in the English Wikipedia however if there was a sound basis for sharing info and reusing it then it would be interesting to see what becomes of it. If that works then I would suggest Commons as the next application, making it easier to enter and search metadata for files there.

ATTRIBUTION
As this information is to be so widespread (Microsoft Bing is already doing something like this with existing infobox data) it becomes even more important that the information is correct so every datum and fact needs to be referenced back to a source and the form for entering data needs to include space for these. This could be partially automated – enter the ISBN and AJAX fills in the name and author if we already have it in the database.

This sounds like a parallel version of Semantic MediaWiki. What is the point, when one already exists, with superior features?

It would certainly be irresponsible to continue with Semantic data without doing a comprehensive review of what Semantic MediaWiki has to offer. With that said, my general impression is that Semantic MediaWiki does not have the focus on infoboxes that this approach would have. My impression of the configuration of Semantic MediaWiki is that it is flexible, yet frustrating to use. It also seems quite feature-heavy, and would need severe paring down, and it does not include one of the most critical elements of my proposal – the AJAX infobox editor.

These impressions may be wrong. At the end of the day, it may make sense to use Semantic MediaWiki as the backend for steps 2 and 3, but step 1 (by far the most development-heavy) is the lynchpin of the proposal, and it is not addressed by Semantic MediaWiki to my knowledge.

As for infobox editing, a gadget already exists: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Revvar/VM
It could be improved in a lot of ways, but it is already pretty helpful.

Some ideas and/or code could be used from this gadget, but if it were up to the task, then we would already be using it. It’s certainly worth keeping on the table for the usability folks to take a peek at.

As for infobox templates, I think the template system is not too bad for that (from a template creator point of view; I don’t know how efficient it is with the system resources), except the mess with the table rows in if templates using {{!}} and similar hacks. Conditional rows would be a nice addition to the current table syntax: something like


|- #if=”{{{area|}}}”
| Area: || {{{area}}}
|- …


is easy to understand and much more readable than


–>{{#if:{{{area|}}}|
{{!-}}
{{!}} Area: {{!!}} {{area}}}
}}< !–


not to mention all sort of unexpected behavior with extra newlines left after transclusion turning into empty tags creating ugly spaces around the infobox.

I'd really like to see this abstracted away to the software. Table wikicode is hideous except for very simple tables.

Interesting comments, particularly on Semantic MediaWiki, thanks for contributing!

As for infobox editing, a gadget already exists: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Revvar/VM
It could be improved in a lot of ways, but it is already pretty helpful.

As for infobox templates, I think the template system is not too bad for that (from a template creator point of view; I don’t know how efficient it is with the system resources), except the mess with the table rows in if templates using {{!}} and similar hacks. Conditional rows would be a nice addition to the current table syntax: something like

|- #if=”{{{area|}}}”
| Area: || {{{area}}}
|- …

is easy to understand and much more readable than

–>{{#if:{{{area|}}}|
{{!-}}
{{!}} Area: {{!!}} {{area}}}
}}<!–

not to mention all sort of unexpected behavior with extra newlines left after transclusion turning into empty tags creating ugly spaces around the infobox.