Carcharoth wrote:
I think what some people want is more a way to take a
category such as
"Famous animals" and its subcategories, and run a dynamic query that
returns a list of all the members of those categories sorted by dates
of birth and death. A dynamic version of a list. I know I'd love it if
that could be done for all biographical articles, so there was some
super-list (and very big one at that), which could be sorted by name,
dates of birth and death, and other biographical data.
That would be more a biographical database than a list, but the
potential is there for Wikipedia to be a massive biographical
database, but extracting clean data is difficult sometimes, because of
how the system is currently set up.
Absolutely true, but delete the word "biographical". The
potential is there for Wikipedia to be a massive database,
period.
And I don't think it would be too hard. Just extract all the
key/value pairs that are currently residing in infobox template
invocations, and dump them into a nice, flexible, free-form
database. Then arrange to invoke the infobox templates out of
that database. Then provide a simple key/value editor on the
edit page, to edit this metadata. Then provide a user-friendly
query wizard. Hey presto, the complaints about editability of
infobox template invocations go way down, *and* we've got cool
new search functionality, and a whole bunch of strange and
tedious-to-maintain categories can go away, and we don't need
to worry about category intersection any more, and...