On Thursday 06 April 2006 20:47, HumanCell .org wrote:
On 06/04/06, Rick DeNatale rick.denatale@gmail.com wrote:
[[Category:MyCategory|MySortKey|DisplayThisInstead]]which would be consistent with the way pipes are used to parameterize Image links e.g. [[Image:MyImage|thumb|Cool caption]]
It would also have the benefit of not breaking existing pages which don't use this new syntax.
Yes, I agree that is a clear advantage - don't want to go breaking existing pages.
On the other hand allowing alternate presentations of category links raises some consistency issues that might make it inadvisable.
Well I'd rather not, but here's why I think it is necessary... and if anyone can think of a better way of doing the following I'd be grateful if you could let me know.
- I have a database of 10,000+ chemical compounds and would like one
article per compound.
- Compounds are related hierarchically e.g. "methane" is an "organic
compound" which in turn is a "molecular entitity" (cf taxonomy/ontology)
- Compounds can have ugly names like
"(+)-cis-3,4-dihydrophenanthrene-3,4-diol"
Current approach:
- each compound is a category with three parts:
- a definition of the compound and its properties
- a list of sub-categories
- links to super-categories
- make the article title a unique identifier (e.g. CHEBI15386) to
avoid the ugly punctuation
- make category links meaningful to users
[[Category:CHEBI15836|Organic aromatic compounds]] replaces the ID with more meaningful text
Any thoughts? Are the issues just specific to my case or are there more general issues at stake?
Cheers.
PS. Just found Semantic MediaWiki which looks very interesting.
Yes, this could indeed be a nice use case for this extension. It gives you some more freedom for describing relationships between your articles, and maybe there are also other properties that one could associate with some compounds (e.g. molecular mass).
If the taxonomy is all that you need, categories could also be a sufficient solution -- the displayed article names really seem to be your only problem here. Would it help to create redirects between articles with nice names and articles with ugly names (note that you would also have to use "plus" for "+" etc.)? If the category mechanism is used only for browsing, then this might already suffice.