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(a)sleepyhead.org> wrote:
On 12/12/06, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene(a)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]]
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