On 4/10/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill(a)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