Help:Microformats

Using Wikipedia's microformats

It is possible for your computer to extract information from Wikipedia pages and then re-use it in other websites or computer programs, such as your calendar or address book.

What: the method we use

We do this using something called microformats. You'll find microformats on lots of other leading websites, too, such as The BBC, Upcoming and LinkedIn.

• You can download details of people, organisations, and places (venues, settlements, etc.), all using the 'hCard microformat'. The coordinates of places uses the 'Geo' microformat; their addresses sometimes use the 'Adr' microformat.
• Events (battles, record releases, etc.) use the 'hCalendar microformat'.
• Articles about products (cars, guitars, computers) use 'hProduct'.
• Audio recordings use 'hAudio'
• The names of living things use the 'species' microformat.

How: Using our microformats

There are two ways to use our microformats, by adding a tool to your web browser, or letting another website do the job for you.

Browser add-ons

Adding a microformat-aware tool to your web browser makes it possible to use our microformats described above. Examples include:

• Internet Explorer - Oomph
• Firefox - Operator
  • You can add scripts to Operator to make it understand additional microformats
• Google Chrome - Michromeformats
• Opera - @Rem's bookmarklet for microformats in Opera

Other websites

Some websites allow you to submit the URL (address) of one of our web pages, and will then act upon the microformats on that page, for you. Examples include:

• Swignition
• Microform.at
• X2V

Technical notes

If you are interested in the technical side of things, here is more detail about microformats, what they do, and how they work:

• Microformats are an agreed set of HTML classes (and occasionally rel attributes).
• hCard contact details can also be exported as vCard files
• hCalendar events can also be exported as iCal calendar entry files
• Some tools will convert microformatted data into RDF, KML, JSON and other data-exchange formats.
• If you run websites, then the source code from some of the above websites can be installed on your own server.