On 4/10/07, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
The lack of structure in these kinds of folksonomies would make Wikipedia quite useless to anyone who isn't casually browsing. The more prescriptive and pre-determined the organisational system is, the more useful Wikipedia becomes to those who want to use it for research.
A problem right now is that our category system is structured but what exactly category membership MEANS is kind of fuzzy. Is it IS-A, IS-RELATED-TO, HAS-A, or what? Many of our categories start off as one type of relationship, but which mutates as it goes deeper. For example, London IS-A city, but HAS-A bus system.
Ideally, articles themselves will eventually include structured, semantic data which would make the need for highly structured categorisation far less important.
Todo: make semantic data approachable for newbies and editable in an easy-to-understand way. We're not 'the encyclopedia anyone can edit' if our article source text is a specialised language that can't be learned just by looking at a couple of examples. Our markup is getting too complicated for its own good already.
-Matt