[WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist

[Steve Summit]

Carcharoth wrote:
> I think what some people want is more a way to take a category such as
> "Famous animals" and its subcategories, and run a dynamic query that
> returns a list of all the members of those categories sorted by dates
> of birth and death. A dynamic version of a list. I know I'd love it if
> that could be done for all biographical articles, so there was some
> super-list (and very big one at that), which could be sorted by name,
> dates of birth and death, and other biographical data.
>
> That would be more a biographical database than a list, but the
> potential is there for Wikipedia to be a massive biographical
> database, but extracting clean data is difficult sometimes, because of
> how the system is currently set up.

Absolutely true, but delete the word "biographical".  The
potential is there for Wikipedia to be a massive database,
period.

And I don't think it would be too hard.  Just extract all the
key/value pairs that are currently residing in infobox template
invocations, and dump them into a nice, flexible, free-form
database.  Then arrange to invoke the infobox templates out of
that database.  Then provide a simple key/value editor on the
edit page, to edit this metadata.  Then provide a user-friendly
query wizard.  Hey presto, the complaints about editability of
infobox template invocations go way down, *and* we've got cool
new search functionality, and a whole bunch of strange and
tedious-to-maintain categories can go away, and we don't need
to worry about category intersection any more, and...