Last modified: 2014-09-24 00:52:29 UTC
Hi, XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and HTML5 define a standard way for authors and accounts to link identity and authorship on the web. Right now the link editor on mediawiki does not have the ability to add the rel="me" markup needed by an author to link to their other accounts. If rel="me" markup is available we could allow wikipedia authors to participate in the Google Authorship program: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1229920 The second step involves adding rel="author" attributes to links from articles to the mediawiki profile pages. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions or want to work more closely on this. Paul plindner@google.com
Of course we accept patches ;) FYI, HTML5 is not currently enabled on Wikimedia Sites. See bug 19719 for HTML5 issues, and bug 27478 for enabling it on WMF wikis
There's an existing XFN plugin here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Link_Attributes However I think this would enable rel= attributes globally, which would be a bad thing to do. Would be happy to send you patches, however some indication of what you'd be willing to accept would be appreciated.
wether or not someone adds rel="me"+googleaccount would of course be entirely their own decisions, such could be easily templated. once rel= passes the parser whitelisting (or does it already ?). "The second step involves adding rel="author" attributes to links from articles to the mediawiki profile pages." That's a bit tough though I think. Wikipedia articles usually don't include their authors. The authors are listed in the article's history page, which is rather a distinct entity from the article itself when seen from the outside. How would Google make the link between an article and the article history page ?
rel=.. is not currently allowed. We're looking at making rel attributes available as a query param for places like this where this type of markup is not allowed. Regarding rel="author" -- For wikipedia we'd go the extra mile :) Adding rel="author" to the history pages would probably be sufficient. I believe there's also an update stream where this data could be slotted. Cheers, paul
Another place where rel=author could be used might be in user's signatures on talk pages I guess.
Created attachment 8809 [details] add rel=author to userlinks Adds the author link to userlinks. (all of them) We probably want to special case this a bit (keep it to just revUserTools() perhaps ? Callpath for formatting userlinks in historypages. includes/HistoryPage.php:HistoryPage: history() includes/HistoryPage.php:HistoryPager formatRow() includes/HistoryPage.php:HistoryPager historyLine() includes/Linker.php: revUserTools() includes/Linker.php: userLink()
Some ideas from a coworker: The right way might be to go very explicit and use http://schema.org/CreativeWork on the history page, with a URL pointing back to the original article, and pointers to all the authors. And then put a rel=author link to the history page from the article (the target page describes the authors, after all). Or put a rel=alternate link to the history page with a suitable type (it's an alternate representation of the document: its history).
Anything I can do to help this move forward? Happy to dust off my rusty php skills if that helps..
Hmm, definitely wrong to add rel=author to *all* user links -- this would be a massive pollution of the semantic link space... At a minimum it needs some kind of back-reference to what you're talking about the author *of*, surely, and that information isn't available to Linker::userLink().
Ping? Anything we can do to help move this along?
Paul, thanks for asking. I'm not sure what you can do to help move this along, but I know that one step will be to request a Git/Gerrit account: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_access https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git/Workflow#How_to_submit_a_patch CC'ing a couple of developers who might be able to opine on this.
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/104202/
Change 104202 had a related patch set uploaded by Nemo bis: Enable XFN rel=me for links on User Profile pages and rel="author" link Bug: 29968 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/104202
Is this still a good idea ? It seems that Google was advocating for this, but now itself has gone with something much simpler: See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1229920 "Based on feedback from authors and webmasters, we've simplified the process of linking your content to your profile information. You can read our new guidelines here. If you've already marked up your content using the process below, don't worry—we'll still recognize your markup." The new methodology is now: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1408986
Might be a good idea to add rel=author to Flow btw...
(In reply to comment #14) > Is this still a good idea ? It seems that Google was advocating for this, but > now itself has gone with something much simpler: See > https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1229920 Does any of the new methods apply here? I see no way the users could get @en.wikipedia.org email addresses and ?rel=author links from the page itself. It seems much cleaner and realistic to 1) use rel=author from the history (and from the footer for $wgMaxCredits > 0); 2) link the history from each page with rel=author and let indexers figure it out (cf. comment 4): <link rel="author license" href="/about"> is an example from an HTML 5 draft http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/document-metadata.html#rel ; 3) whitelist rel=me links from user pages in some way (or let some extension figure this out). Note that some are using ridiculously complex mixes of extensions to do this: http://blog.säsongsmat.nu/2012/07/31/adding-authorship-information-to-mediawiki-pages/
Change 104202 abandoned by Vishnunk90: Enable XFN rel=me for links on User Profile pages and rel="author" link Reason: The uploaded patch was unable to resolve the issue https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/104202
