Help:Microformats

A microformat (sometimes abbreviated μF), a web-based approach to semantic markup, seeks to re-use existing HTML/XHTML tags to convey metadata and other attributes in web pages and other contexts that support (X)HTML, such as RSS. This approach allows software to process information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and the like) automatically.

Using Wikipedia's microformats

It is possible for your computer to extract information from Wikipedia pages and then re-use it in other websites, to convert, aggregate or chart it; 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 use 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'.
• Food items use hRecipe
• Audio recordings and articles about records etc. 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 the 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:

• Anything To Triples
• Swignition
• Transformr
• uFxtract
• X2V

(The source code from some of these websites can be downloaded for installation on a private server.)

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, though not on Wikipedia, rel attributes).
• Some tools will convert our microformatted data into RDF, KML, JSON and other data-exchange formats.
  • hCard data can be exported as vCard files
  • hCalendar events can be exported as iCal calendar entry files

Project

For further details, and to participate in the deployment of microformats on Wikipedia, join our Microformats Project.