On 6/6/06, Roger Luethi collector@hellgate.ch wrote:
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.
Ok. I suspect rules like "Express X by doing Y and Z" are going to work better than "Don't do X".
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.
Would it be credible to say that for 90% of the time the new system is better, and for the other 10% we leave it the way it is?
Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a good method for presenting and editing the kind of graphs we're talking about in a wiki.
No. I'd like to try doing some experiments though. We don't necessarily need "graphs". Tables and hierarchical lists may be a start, depending on what you're talking about.
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".
Yeah, I know. But I would actually rather see a film article labelled "Films", "Made in France", "Made in US" rather than labelled "Films made in France", "Films made in the US".
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.
Yep. But there's no software support for that atm.
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.
What would actually be good would be being able to define categories in terms of attributes. Stick a {{Category:Polish chemists}} template on an article, which substitutes [[Attribute:Polish]] and [[Attribute:Chemists]], as well as containing a link to the category "Polish chemists". This category would be nothing more than a description and some sort of link to the two attributes, causing all articles with both attributes to be displayed.
IMHO it would not be a huge amount of work to implement, could be phased in gradually, and would be a huge improvement.
Steve