On Mon, 05 Jun 2006 11:43:30 +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
theme (eg, Women throughout the ages, or whatever). Disaster is inevitable from that point onward.
We can fix that.
Yep. We need to document these new rigid rules somewhere. I do like
First we need to find out which rules make sense and then make a convincing case: Demonstrate the benefits, have answers to apparent drawbacks, a realistic migration path. Compare the problems solved to the problems left.
If we ever got that far, there should be a sandbox that challenges people to add problem and corner cases. New rules have little credibility unless you can demonstrate that you don't have to rethink parts of your system every time a new example comes up.
Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a good method for presenting and editing the kind of graphs we're talking about in a wiki.
So "living women" is taxonomy, but "Living persons" is an attribute?
I haven't thought this one through - ideas would be good. Ideally, we would have proper attributes, such that "living" could be stamped on someone (but that "living" could not be applied to artworks, tv shows or whatever...). I don't know a good way to taxonomise people, but I'm sure others do.
Ah, here I agree. So we have attributes for state (dead/alive). You probably want them for location, too. Being able to slap "in France" on an article would be helpful. Problem is, not everything is a bridge where "in <location>" has an unambiguous meaning in relation to the subject of the article. An American movie may be "set in France", or a movie set in the US may be "shot in France". And people may be "born in France" or have "died in France".
I guess the reason I am only mildly interested in hierarchies is that many interesting attributes (dead/alive, colors, professions) don't fit well into hierarchies. I think the real power comes from combining attributes.
The German WP is much closer to that. For instance, they don't have categories like "Polish Chemists". They only have the attribute categories "Polish" and "Chemist". From a practical point of view, that's less usable than what we have (they basically need to use CatScan which is fairly limited, and casual users don't know about it anyway). But it's conceptually cleaner, and they are in a better position for making interesting experiments.
Your definitions of taxonomies and attributes need work :-).
Heh :) Input welcome! I think the distinction between "taxonomy" and "attribute" is probably a sliding scale. It comes down to what is natural. Do we really think in terms of "nobel laureates"? I doubt it
Combining rigid rules with common sense is hard. I am tempted to quote your line about inevitable disaster.
Distinct namespaces for different types of categories. It would involve some coding and the migration must be planned, but it might be easier to explain and easier to maintain. It would also be another small step towards a semantic web.
How many? What would you call them? What are the arguments against?
Your first question answers the third :-). As for the second, I don't think implementation details matter much at this stage.
Roger