[uf-discuss] Re: Thoughts on MF & Wiki

[Chris Messina]

For you example, consider this (behold, the power of community wikis):

Take: "We're meeting at Gordon Biersch at 10:30 tomorrow - be there!"

Change to: We're meeting at
[Event: Gordon Biersch at 10:30 tomorrow] - be there!"

The wiki can both parse that information (like 30boxes) but can also
create a temporary event listing that other people can come and garden
later. If they don't, that's fine, the HTML output can still be
generic to show approximately what content on the page is an event.

What do you think about that general method? There's instant benefit
(the text would be added to a calendar of some sort, some processing
might occur, and it's added to a list that can be gardened later)?

Chris

On 3/27/06, David Weekly <david at weekly.org> wrote:
> > First, writing microformats should be 1. invisible. 2. useful.
>
> Much agreed on both.
>
> The problem I see might be more fundamental, though. Unless people see
> a benefit to writing in a more structured way (vs "We're meeting at
> Gordon Biersch at 10:30 tomorrow - be there!"), they're probably not
> going to. Asking users to formalize their speech is an endeavor not
> likely to succeed.
>
> Success will come from tools/widgets that make it as fast or faster to
> drop in the essence of what is being done (add a meeting at Gordon
> Bierch for 10:30pm the next day), giving some direct benefit to the
> user (adding it to the wiki calendar) while quietly dropping in the MF
> code.
>
> Asking users to even put in something that's transformable to MF still
> requires structure that is antithetical to wiki-ness.
>
> > Therefore, if the wiki knows about a contact, it should autocomplete a
> > vcard for me.
>
> Automated things like this (recognizing email addresses for which more
> information is known) absolutely should offer more information
> whereever they can.
>
> -D
>