2008/12/12 Lukasz Bolikowski <bolo(a)icm.edu.pl>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,
Ćukasz
--
-Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be much better.