Semantic MediaWiki: Toward smarter wikis

And that's a perfect example that not only is data modeling hard, so is syntax.

Either Paris is *not* the name of a page, and the syntax of the first example is wrong, or 65,821,885 *is* the name of a page... or the second example is wrong.

In short, you can't *just* do this as a marker on a wikilink, or else you have no way to mark inline non-link text that is suddenly also data.

So, you either need *two different ways* to tag semantic data (as a marker inside a standard wikilink *and* as some other syntax on unlinked text -- and believe me, mediawikitext syntax is messy enough right now)...

*or*, you need two *layers* of marker, the traditional way to mark wikilinks and a separate way to mark semantic text... which is *equally* confusing to editors in the first example -- and do you put the semantic marks inside or outside the wikilink marks? (The problem is even more difficult than it was for me to punctuate that paragraph readably. ;-)

(And note that I'm not even mentioning that we're out of paired markers here...)

This is a great idea... but coming up with an end-user implementation that doesn't cause everyone to tear out their hair is going to be non-trivial in the extreme. (For those who haven't read the Jargon file recently, that translates as "very *very* close to theoretically impossible" :-}).