[Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

[Bryan Derksen]

Matt Kingston wrote:

>Sounds to me like it would be a sort of "expert" system. Consider:
> 
>The Wikipedia article Anne Frank could have tags at the bottom like
> 
>{WasBorn:1929}
>(IsA:Woman}
>{Wrote:The_Diary_Of_A_Young_Girl}
>{BornIn:Germany}
>  
>
How about this:
[[Category:1929 births]]
[[Category:German authors]]
[[Category:Women]]

and on the article for "The Diary of a Young Girl" we could put
[[Category:Books by Anne Frank]]

>Since facts aren't tied to one language, the "relationship database" could span all languages (since there is already a system for linking articles on the same subject to different languages). A relationship would have a certain ID internally with "translations" to different languages. So after typing in: {BornIn:Germany} in the english version, the computer would find the french equivelent of the relationship -BornIn- and the french equiv of Germany and update the french Anne_Frank article accordingly.
>  
>
How about interwiki links on the category pages?

Categorization is pretty free-form at the moment, but standards have 
been developing and the category structures have been slowly coalescing 
so that eventually it might be adequate for these sorts of activities. 
The birth/death categories are very standardized, the nationalities and 
occupations less so but still useable. Most book articles don't have 
authorship categories to them, but there are genre and publication date 
categories most fall into.

There's no [[category:women]], but if there was a need for one it could 
theoretically be created. Might not be popular at the moment, though, 
considering how categories currently work; that'd be a fearsomely huge 
category and splitting the nationality/occupation/birthdate categories 
up instead would be rather awkward. Maybe once there are better 
category-sorting functions supported (intersections, unions, etc.)

We're 90% of the way to what you've suggested already, let's not 
reinvent the wheel and recategorize every article in the Wikipedias if 
we can help it. :)