User:Reversedragon/Embedding RDF in wiki pages (SeaTurtle proposal)

During the early development of this project, we attempted to use Wikibase, but quickly realized that there were some serious problems with it in terms of getting started from a fresh MediaWiki install. One of the biggest problems was that it was not trivial to transclude Wikibase Items into regular wiki pages through templates. Another problem was that it was not easy to list Wikibase Items using normal MediaWiki Categories, or customize category listings to be suitable for displaying basic Item metadata. This would seem obvious for the use case of new users exploring a given knowledge base who do not know much about MediaWiki or the way Wikibase works — nested categories are a great way to get a feel for what kinds of overall topics the knowledge base covers, and MediaWiki's built-in Category mechanism is easy and uncomplicated for new users to learn to edit.

This slowly led us toward the development of a new MediaWiki extension, tentatively named SeaTurtle. Said extension is currently only in the planning phase, but this page will provide help with coding it.