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Microformats Wiki 2.0 is Live!

Thank you to everyone for being patient whilst I ran the MediaWiki upgrade this evening. It took a little longer than hoped thanks to very slow database migration scripts, but the microformats wiki is now live again, and back to full read-write access.

There’s a lot to say about the process of the redesign, which I’ll try to capture at a later date on my personal blog, since it’s been an interesting project to work through. But, For a more immediate summary of what’s been changed and enhanced (plus some gotcha bug-fixes made to MediaWiki itself), check out the Wiki 2.0 page on the wiki itself.

For the casual observer, you can get an idea of the redesign by visiting and comparing the the Wiki front page, the hCard specification and the hAtom draft specification.

We’ve also got space set aside on the wiki to file bug reports (wiki-2-issues), and feedback is welcome in the comments here as well as on the microformats-discuss mailing list.

The aim, as always, is that improvements like this to our tools will help us to more effectively work with and build microformats; I very much hope you like the changes.

Microformats.org Wiki Upgrade

Updated: 17th November, 00:31 (GMT-8).

As announced on the -discuss mailing list earlier this week, the microformats wiki is due a big upgrade. That’s going to be happening over the next few hours, so the wiki will be read-only for a (hopefully short) while whilst backups are taken and upgrade scripts run.

Afterward, the wiki will be updated to MediaWiki 1.13, be running some new extensions to improve authoring and reading and be updated to resemble the still-gorgeous microformats.org look and feel. This is as good a time as any to thank Dan Cederholm for the great work he did on the original theme way back when we launched.

This post will be updated with progress. Thank you for your patience.

Update 1: The wiki is now in read-only mode, and the database backed up and duplicated.

Update 2: We’re now running MediaWiki’s update script on the mirrored database. The microformats wiki is, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, rather large, and we’re skipping ahead by a large number of MediaWiki revisions, so there’s a lot to be altered. For your amusement, the script output currently reads “Deleting old default messages (this may take a long time!)…”. Rarely a truer word spoken.

Update 3: And we are live. Over the next hour or so you’ll see things move around a little as I go through and update some default page settings and start fitting things into our new categories system. I’ll also be added a new page explaining the changes I’ve made in more detail, introducing you to the new mark-up we support and, once those instructions are in place, providing a place that you can report issues and provider feedback. Thanks very much for bearing with us during this update!

Building open textual content on HTML

The Web is by far the most successful medium in history for the open publishing and sharing of content. Focusing efforts to promote and enable open content on the Web first and foremost (rather than say, proprietary data warehouses and corporate databases) thus has the greatest enabling effect for open content in general.

Textual content on the Web is dominated by HTML (including XHTML of course) due to its broad reach and ease of authorship. The more we are able to use HTML as the common carrier of higher fidelity chunks of information, the more we empower and enrich the publishing and sharing of textual content.

Thus microformats are developed in line with “plain old semantic HTML” () practices and principles, that is, as valid semantic extensions to HTML. Semantic HTML by itself enables sharing open content with headings, paragraphs, and lists, etc. Microformats build upon that foundation, rather than reinventing (i.e. reuses HTML for lists and nested lists for outlines, rather than inventing new tags or vocabulary), and extending only for commonly published semantics beyond HTML, such as , , , , etc.

These extensions can be used to publish documents containing just one type of information for consumption by domain-specific applications (e.g. a contact list for address books, or an event list for calendaring tools), or many types intermixed and nested, embedded in a larger document that ties them all together with meaningful context such as a resume, meaning that would be lost were each type of data isolated, removed from its context, and published in its own special-purpose format silo.

Whether simple collections, or compound documents, by building on HTML, all such uses work well not only on their own, but embedded and mixed with existing web content, in a way well understood by web authors, browsers and search engines alike, in stark contrast to . Finally, it is this broader reach, to existing content, authors, applications, search services, and a variety of devices, that makes textual content built on HTML even more open from a practical perspective.

Open content depends on open standards

Creative Commons (CC) pioneered broad awareness of the need and value of open content publishing and sharing. By providing a set of licenses that let authors clearly choose how and under what conditions to make their content freely available, CC also made it easier.

Open content is dependent on the formats used to publish it for how “open” it truly is. Open content published in a proprietary format supported only by a single-vendor proprietary application is only as open as that single-vendor chooses to make it. E.g. open content authored in and published in its default is not “open” to Macintosh users (even converters have problems). Such open content is essentially held hostage by the sole application (and the sole platform family that it runs on) that supports that format. In addition, if the sole vendor in this case chooses to stop supporting that sole application, then open content in that format becomes dead content. More on that in a future post on “data longevity“.

Content is most easily, reliably, and broadly shared when the formats used by such content are as open as possible. Truly open formats encourage the maximum amount of documentation (from syndicated blog posts to professionally published books), and interoperable implementations (from open source to proprietary for-profit) of such formats. I encourage everyone developing open standards to make them as open as possible, by taking the same steps we have taken with microformats, and thus better enabling open content, and the thereof.

Making open standards as open as possible — required public domain licensing of all microformats wiki contributions

Today we are changing the microformats wiki to require that all contributions be placed into the public domain. This means that any page created, or any content added to the microformats wiki from here forward is placed into the public domain for maximum possible reuse.

We take these steps to make the open standards as open as possible.

Five months ago Rohit Khare introduced the Voluntary Public Domain declaration to the microformats wiki which was quickly adopted by all the admins and the majority of active contributors. The end result is that, much of the microformats wiki, including several microformats themselves have already been placed into the public domain.

What you can do to help immediately

  1. Use and advocate the valid, interoperable use and implementation of open standards that are as open as possible (including microformats where appropriate).
  2. If you are a member of the microformats community, edit your user page to include the Creative Commons Public Domain Declaration template (CC-PD declaration) to explicitly place all your past contributions into the public domain. If your user page already has the voluntary public domain declaration, upgrade it to use the CC-PD declaration.
  3. Encourage other microformats contributors to also add the CC-PD declaration to their user pages.

Moving forward

Our goal is to put all of the microformats.org wiki into the public domain. We will be taking the following steps to do so.

  1. We are encouraging everyone who has contributed to microformats to explicitly place their past contributions into the public domains as noted above. We are going to give folks a month (until the end of January 2008) to do so because we’d like to keep as much of the contributions as possible. Those who do not want to release their past contributions to the microformats wiki into the public domain may simply remove such contributions, or indicate that preference on their user page(s). Editors will take care to look through page histories and remove past contributions from users who have indicated that preference.
  2. Starting February 1st, primary editors and authors of pages should start cleaning microformats.org wiki pages created before today of non-public-domain content, and then submitting them for review. After reviewing them, one of the admins will add the Creative Commons Public Domain License template (CC-PD license) to the bottom of the page.
  3. When all pages are new or cleaned, the admins will move the text of the CC-PD license to the global footer on the wiki, thus indicating that the contents of the entire wiki is in the public domain.

Inspiration

We are here because of the great work that others have done before us. The following building blocks and good examples have all contributed to and inspired the steps we have taken today:

By embracing open standards development in the public domain, we hope other standards bodies and communities who choose to call their efforts “open” are encouraged by the example we set here today to do so as well.

The importance of open development of standards for data formats cannot be overstated. Following posts will expand on how open standards are essential for open content, , and data longevity.

Tantek Çelik

Related background and history

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