On 6/7/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/7/06, Roger Luethi collector@hellgate.ch wrote:
Because it does. Where it's different is that the category names make it much clearer what does and what does not belong into the category, the catch-all "thematic" categories are eliminated (or made explicit by
saying
"is related to").
Maybe the way to go is have only attributes, but then make certain attributes themselves belong to thematic categories. Something like:
The Outsider +Novel +By Albert Camus +Existentialist
I was considering once in passing the structural and technical challenges of formatting a WP-like project in which an underlying structure of "Facts" and categorizations of those facts was set up underneath the articles. Each Fact would have attributes like references, links, etc. Articles would have prioritized lists of relevant facts, with a system to allow rating and adding and tagging the facts at the meta level.
Articles could then be written based on a snapshot of the agreed-upon facts base for the particular article.
One of the additional uses would be as an input database to various inferrence engines.
At a technical and operational level, it's a completely different project concept than Wikipedia, even though the end result might be similar from the article standpoint.
It worries me that the startup effort required probably is impractical.
It seems to me that a lot of the categorization analysis I'm seeing here is similar to a half-attempt to set up such a structure project.
It's interesting to me that conventional online references and encyclopedias don't seem to have attempted this. That's not a comment that it might not be a good thing, but they may not have tried because it's too hard, not because they didn't think of it.
Part of the hard part seems to be that getting the initial framing and conceptual rules down close enough to right is a lot harder than the initial energy required to start something like Wikipedia, and even borrowing WP resources and making it part of WP to do it as a WP adjunct in this category structure may be impractically hard.
Can you or others in this thread address your thoughts on how to move this into the realm of the practical? I would sort of like to be wrong on the nearterm practicality of an approach like this, since it seems extremely useful in the long term.