User:Maximilian.Klein.LRMI/sandbox

Hi all -

I'm Max Klein. I would like to make it possible to use metadata - in the form of LRMI and Schema - on Wikibooks. Yaron Koren and I have developed a Mediawiki extension and a library of templates to use in conjunction with it that would allow this to happen.

LRMI and Schema are ways to describe the information contained on a page in a way that is easily intelligible to machines. Schema was developed by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex, while LRMI was developed by a broad coalition of people and groups interested in open educational resources headed by Creative Commons and the Association of Educational Publishers. You can see significantly more detail about Schema and LRMI in the collapsed proposal below, or on their websites (linked above,) and the LRMI specification.

This is a simplified version of the proposal that I initially posted on this page. Hopefully, it will better convey why we think this idea is important. I've left my original post directly below this one in a collapsed box. It contains a lot more details than this does. I know that it's unusual to do this to a proposal that has already initially been posted, but I think it is for the best in this case. If anyone strongly feels that this is inappropriate, please let me know.

Why would we want to do this?
Machines can't always understand information that is contained in text, even if humans are able to. Metadata of the nature we are suggesting adding helps machines understand what a page is about. The biggest effect this would have would be increasing the accessibility of Wikibooks' content via search engines. Schema.org was formed collaboratively by Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Yandex with the aim of making it easier for people to find high quality relevant results in their searches. Most major search engines use metadata in their search result placement, as well as use metadata to generate better previews of pages. Improving the accessibility of Wikibooks content via search engines would allow more people access to free knowledge. The addition of metadata to Wikibooks would also allow other people to build tools that better catalog Wikibooks content in ways not currently possible.

What would this involve for Wikibooks editors?
Editors could add the template to books that they happened to be editing already. The template would not be in any way required - it could gradually be added to existing Wikibooks’ content over time. Every page tagged would present an incremental benefit. The template could be added either by cut and pasting it, or by clicking the LRMI button that we have added to the editing window.

Here’s what the template looks like:

The tags that are currently in the template are taken from LRMI's specification. It would be easy to add other tags from schema.org's specification that would be useful to describe Wikibooks content as well. Not all pages would have to be tagged with this template, and on pages that do use this template, not all parameters would have to be filled out. Although many of the parameters in the template are self-explanatory, not all are - we would copy over descriptions of what each parameter is for from LRMI's specification, and include further details about how to fill them out. From a technical standpoint, doing all of this would involve installing the HTML Tags Mediawiki extension on Wikibooks, and porting over the templates we have developed.

I think that the use of metadata has significant potential to benefit Wikibooks without adding too much workload to Wikibooks' contributors.