[uf-discuss] Largest Deployment of Microformats on one site?

[Andy Mabbett]

In message <E6E11BC3-BF3C-493E-B183-1A606C4EF523 at theryanking.com>, ryan
<ryan at theryanking.com> writes

>On Jan 18, 2008, at 12:31 PM, Ben Ward wrote:
>
>> For reasons which will be revealed next week (yes, I'm a tease,
>>sorry), I'm interested to know what the largest deployment of any
>>microformat is on a single site, in terms of numbers of instances   of
>>microformats.
>
>I'm guessing its local.yahoo.com. I think its in the 10s of millions.

Wikipedia may not have that many, but it does have a vast number, see:

    <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Microformats>

and (noting sub-categories also):

    <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Templates_generating_microformats>

A few are broken, because people who don't know what they're doing have
been meddling (welcome to Wikipedia!) with the relevant templates (for
coordinates), and because planned jobs to automate the conversion of
"prose" dates to templates using ISO formats (for album release dates,
aircraft accidents, space launches, etc., all marked up with hCalendar,
for example) have not been completed. Here's an example of one that is
done:

    <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Side_of_the_Moon>

and here's one showing the relevant edit:

    <http://tinyurl.com/29gey9>

Again, it is unfortunate that some people, perhaps without realising
what they're doing, change such templates back to prose content.

Most WP microformats, though, are correct, and WP has a good combination
of high numbers and *different* types of usage (hCard on biographies and
articles about bands and companies, geo or hCard for places, the
aforesaid hCalendars and so on). It even uses the draft "Species"
microformat for every article with a taxonomic info panel, or "Taxobox":

    <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Taxobox>

Also don't forget that many non-English versions of Wikipedia also use
microformats; as do other MediaWiki Foundation projects like WikiSpecies
and WikiCommons, which uses Geo:

    <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Location_dec>

example:

        <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:StationUtrecht.jpg>


Google, mentioned elsewhere, may have lots of hCards, but most are badly
broken:

    <http://tinyurl.com/38gbbl>

as they've been aware since last August:

    <http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007-August/010330.html>

    (aka: <http://tinyurl.com/2j7k7s>)

-- 
Andy Mabbett