2008/12/12 Lukasz Bolikowski bolo@icm.edu.pl:
C'mon, even mathematicians have common sense, sometimes :) A mathematician would simply say that the relation of being a close friend is not transitive.
Yeah, but a physicist would say: 'Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman' and everyone would laugh.
Thus, if the interlanguage links were to mean "roughly equivalent", then it wouldn't be transitive and it would be unsound to perform a transitive closure.
Yup. Fraid so. Cool research though.
In other words, if the links are interpreted as "roughly equivalent" then you're absolutely right: it doesn't make sense to do the analysis that I've done.
Well, let's take an example, like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket
Down the side are a huge number of links including the French one:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fus%C3%A9e_spatiale
This title translates as 'Space Rocket'.
Now straight away we are in trouble. The English wikipedia's Rocket article is about the general case of rockets- any vehicle that is propelled by a rocket engine, including a rather awesome Russian torpedo, some drag racers, aircraft, and the worlds fastest train (Mach 8.5!!!), whereas the French article is about only space rockets.
But there's nowhere else to go. And this feature is working exactly as intended.
Now the English wikipedia pretty much has an article on that too 'Launch vehicle', so really the return link from the French article could go there instead... not back to rocket: and we've moved already. (As it happens the actual link from fr goes back to Rocket, but there's no reason that the wikipedia doesn't have a precise article on space rocket in which case my example would be even clearer, it's just a fluke.) It really doesn't take many hops and we would be somewhere completely different.
And at no stage is the linkage strictly wrong. The underlying problem is that you're assuming exact correspondence, whereas it's more like a thesaurus; these are *synonymous links*. The phrase for people in the know is: 'There's no such thing as a true synonym.' And that's what blows it up.
The problems are many fold. Linked articles can have a definition that makes them a subset, partial overlap or superset. If you go through a few rounds of going to subset and then partial overlap and back up to superset you can end up practically anywhere, as you've shown rather admirably. There is absolutely no reason to think that these links are transitive in practice or theory.
Regards, Łukasz