On Mar 31, 2012, at 02:00 , John McClure wrote:
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.
I see a major issue with the user interface of this (though I agree with your assessment). It has to be very easy to set the right subject, otherwise people will not do it.
The dbpedia people extract some rough classification of the articles. It is not perfect, but may be worth looking at that, too.
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.
I think the project should reach out to libraries, ie, real experts. The library world is currently looking at the issues of how to redefine cataloging standards, how to make them Linked Data friendly, etc; because that work is still in flux, it may be the ideal time to talk to them. In view of the importance of WP, libraries cannot allow themselves to ignore this (I believe...)
Ivan
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
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---- Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/ mobile: +31-641044153 FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf