Hello,
Can/should wiki subject indexes be a functional requirement of the wikidata project, or of some other? I think navigating a wiki today without a subject index is difficult, to say the least. A subject index seems such a critical component for information libraries! WP's portals are a nice step but still, users seem at the mercy of topical links inserted by authors of the portal. How much better it would be to have a taxonomy of subjects that can be associated with a page by ITS author so that the page can be found independently of portals.
The semantics of SKOS, I suggest, should be baked in to wikis. I also suggest faceted UDC [1] or similar inter/national classification scheme be one of many that can be referenced by users when browsing any wiki. I envision that Subjects would be defined in a namespace as fundamental to a wiki as the Category namespace is. Basically, I can see requesting some software to correlate my own subject taxonomy with interwikis' (WP's) tasxonomies, so that I as a user don't have to manually search each interwiki for content relative to my personal list of subjects.
Is this an idea before its time, something already considered, or something to consider now? Thanks for your thoughts. -- john
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Decimal_Classification