For Wikipedia's purposes, it would be much better to work on computation to "translate" the text.
One of the fundamental tenets of wikis is that they remain as close to natural language and markup as possible -- the wiki format should remain readable.
This:
Paris is a [[type:=city]] in [[located in::France]], with a population of [[population:=1,000,000,000]].
is not.
On 12/13/06, cohesion cohesion@sleepyhead.org wrote:
On 12/12/06, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
Unfortunately, it would not. At least, not completely. Categorization is not transitive: if article A is a member of category C, and C is a subcat of D, A need not be a member of D. For example: [[Seine]] is in [[Category:Paris]], which is in [[Category:Cities in France]], which is in [[Category:France]], which is in [[Category:Republics]], which ultimately is a subcat of [[Category:Thought]].
But the Seine is not a thought, a republic, or a city in France.
Categories as implemented now have mixed meanings: they can describe "is-a", "has-a" or "is-related-to" connections. See earlier discussions on this list in September 2004 and June 2006 (http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/htdig/wikien-l/2006-June/048183.html
).
Eugene
This is a real problem, which an extension, semantic mediawiki, (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki) was made to solve. It's definitely worth taking a look at for situations like this. It allows you to do things like say, "Paris is a [[type:=city]] in [[located in::France]], with a population of [[population:=1,000,000,000]]. You can then do fun things like say, show me all the cities with populations over 20 etc.
For this original example, Fred is a [[profession::writer]] who committed [[type of death::suicide]]. [[Category:People]] etc. You could then query all the writers who's type of death was suicide without having to have one million categories for every possible union. I hope one day we can (maybe cross your fingers) use some of this on the main wikipedia. It's usefulness as a replacement for a lot of categories is one of the biggest benefits.
Judson [[:en:User:Cohesion]] _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l