Wikispooks:SMW Best Practice

SMW is new on Wikispooks so editors and administrators are learning as they go, but some best practices are emerging:

Object Orientation

A set of objects is being co-developed with a matching set of properties. Each of these correspond to high level structures such as Event, Person, Group etc. and should consist of matching set or properties, semantic template and semantic form.

No loose markup

Wikispooks is following the SMW recommendation of strongly discouraging loose pieces of inline markup. For reasons of future-proofing and maintenance, SMW properties should be assigned through Semantic Templates. By using templates to add the semantic properties, it is easy to adjust them as needed. The main semantic template to use for replacing inline semantic data is Template:SMWData.

Presenting SMW Data

SMW querying is the recommended way to present large data tables inline in pages, since this is easier in terms of reuse. The main semantic template for displaying semantic data is Template:SMWDocs, which is a kind of 'catch all' for relevant data. When inserted in a page manually, it should usually be used just before the "References" section.

Updating existing Data

Until the basic structures are fixed, the process of updating the data is complicated by the fact that the target formats is still evolving. In particular

Descriptions

Every Wikispooks page needs a description. Since this format is fixed, it provides an easy way to start helping the transition to an SMW-based site. Note that the description should:

Make sense when viewed in isolation (One of the main uses will be to describe links in from other pages)
Be a single paragraph of plaintext (no wiki formatting)
Be <500 characters (i.e ~4 lines at most)