User:Maximilian.Klein.LRMI/RfC

Sandboxing an RfC before we end up making it live so that I make sure I got formatting etc right :)

Proposal to implement metadata on Wikibooks
Hi all -

I’m Max Klein. For the last few months, I’ve been working with Yaron Koren to develop HTML Tags, a new extension for Mediawiki that can support the use of LRMI (Learning Resource Metadata Initiative), a metadata framework for educational resources and other metadata schemas built on schema.org’s in general. Metadata frameworks like LRMI are not supported in a default installation of Mediawiki because they use HTML in a way that was not yet envisioned when Mediawiki's core parser was written.

Disclosure: our work on HTML Tags has been financed by Creative Commons.

Why use metadata?
We think that using metadata has a lot of potential benefits to a project like Wikibooks. The addition of metadata to Wikibooks should have significant effects on the accessibility of Wikibooks’ resources via search engines. Schema.org was formed collaboratively by Bing, Google, Yahoo!, and Yandex, with the explicitly stated aim of making it easier for their users to turn up high quality relevant results in their searches. Besides the direct effect on search placement, most major search engines also use metadata like LRMI and Schema.org to help generate rich snippets, which improve the preview of a website that the user of a search engine is shown. Whereas improving access to information is a primary goal of Wikibooks and the Wikimedia movement, we believe improved search result quality by itself is a compelling reason to implement HTML Tags and LRMI.

We also anticipate that there may be unexpectedly creative uses of HTML Tags in contexts other than pure metadata. Although we cannot guarantee we’ll be able to provide technical support for all such uses, we are certainly excited about them. We’ll support cool side projects where we can, and if something comes up that we can’t support we’ll try to connect you with volunteers with the appropriate skill-sets to progress your project.

Readiness and end user experience
The HTML Tags extension is fully developed and has been tested on other Mediawiki installations in the wild. We have also developed a preliminary set of templates to use in conjunction with it. The extension along with the templates handle all of the behind-the-scenes stuff so all the user has to do to add metadata to a page is fill out the template. We think that makes it as easy as possible to add valid LRMI and schema.org markup to any wiki page - it is no harder than using any other template. We’ve set up a demo wiki on Referata, please feel free to play around with it.

The two formal proposals
We would like to try to launch a discussion aimed at achieving consensus on two points:
 * 1) First, that Wikibooks should install the Mediawiki extension HTML Tags.
 * 2) Second, that the addition of LRMI and schema.org metadata to Wikibooks should be encouraged and the template library that we’ve developed at the demo should be migrated to Wikibooks.
 * Once consensus has been established on the first point, the extension will be installed via a Bugzilla request - since it requires shell access. The templates can be transferred and edited to adapt to Wikibooks’ needs at any point as necessary by any editor, since shell access is not needed to do so.

In order to keep the amount of displayed text on this page manageable, we have transcluded most of the material displayed here from this page and this page. I’ll drop a note here if we make any edits to the main body of the RfC. We may make edits to (and expand) the FAQ as this thread progresses to ensure that all commonly asked questions are answered in our original post. We are using this format to ensure that all of the collapsed content didn’t clutter up this page too much. Thanks, Maximilian.Klein.LRMI (discuss • contribs) 01:47, 10 January 2013 (UTC)