Topic on Talk:Structured Data Across Wikimedia

The mockup shows an editing interface but it doesn't say anything about how the structure of the underlying metadata. In previous discussions about the Visual Editor, Flow and Structured discussion there was the sentiment that it's important that everything is editable as Wikitext. That leaves the question:

1. Is it important that Structured data on Wikimedia is editable as Wikitext?
2. If so how would it be best structured?

Hi Christian, thank you for bringing this up! Sorry for the delay in answering, but I wanted to be sure of the technical details of my answer (which won't be short, so apologies for this too).

So, we did consider adding the section metadata as editable wikitext, but ultimately we think there are a lot of potential difficulties with that, and that on the contrary we would have many advantages in keeping it separate.

Conceptually, separating metadata about a document or text from the document itself makes sense. It also allows machines to read and understand it separately. This is the way we did it with Structured Data on Commons, via Extension:WikibaseMediaInfo. It has several advantages, such as:

• the ability to refine user permissions for accessing and editing this type of data, and
• reducing cognitive burden on editors who are not interested in working with this data (as we said in the main page, we don't want to "overwhelm users with too much new content to moderate").

We would also like to try not to complicate wikitext further, by adding additional markup from a technical perspective, because this would create more maintenance burden on a critical piece of the MediaWiki environment (again, we don't want to "introduce too much complexity into our systems").

Also, in the end, information in wikitext is not fully structured data that can be consistently read and understood by machines. We want to ensure that the metadata created by this project will be accessible in a robust, consistent, structured and linked format.

Anyway, I would like to hear more about your reasons why you think it is important that everything be editable as wikitext. Perhaps we can think of other ways to solve those problems.

I’m not convinced by this yet. If the metadata isn’t tied in with the wikitext, how will the connection between the two be established? It seems to me that it would break each time a heading is renamed in the wikitext.

Indeed it would. As far as I know the Platform team is looking into creating stable identifiers for sections, which will allow us to properly associate metadata with a section ... it is possible, however, that the initial PoC will just use the section title text

Would this introduce the long talked about annotation service?

Hi Lokal, I'm not sure it would introduce that service as it is described, but I think that would probably turn into a use case for our project, so thanks for bringing this up! Do you have any additional insight or suggestion about this that you want to share with us?

I think most of it is in the notes for that meeting. Not sure whether @Cscott has looked at this further since then. @Sebastian Berlin (WMSE) might be able to point you to some of the early notes from m:Wikispeech about which changes we determined should invalidate our planned annotations.

We're working on annotations (of a sort) in the process of implementing support for the Translate extension in Parsoid, so we should probably touch base about unifying the various efforts.