On Wed, 07 Jun 2006 00:39:52 +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
On 6/6/06, Roger Luethi collector@hellgate.ch wrote:
With the current software, that could be implemented as:
[[Paris]] [[Category:is a city]] [[Category:is a (is there a name for "city or town or village or some other place"?)]] [[Category:in France]] (or [[Category:located in France]]) [[Category:in Europe]]
Okay.
Why do I get the feeling the current structure probably already looks a lot like that, but with different names?
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").
What i see is (I added more information for illustration):
[[Britney Spears]] [[Category:is a singer]] [[Category:is an entertainer]] [[Category:is a person]] [[Category:is a child actor]] [[Category:is an entertainer]] [[Category:is a person]] [[Category:is alive]] [[Category:is female]] [[Category:born 1981]] [[Category:born in McComb, Mississippi]] (that kind of category would be hard to maintain manually)
Good, good - why is that cat hard to maintain manually?
Because for every place someone was born in, you have to recreate the hierarchy of geography, which is large. An automatic system could infer from existing information that [[Category:born in McComb, Mississippi]] also means, say, [[Category:born in Mississippi]], or if you want to be really fancy, that being born in Prague implies a different country depending on the year of birth.
Here are some other fun (existing!) categories from said article:
Worst Actress Razzie: "won a Worst Actress Razzi" Soubrettes: "is a soubrette", I guess!? American child actors: ...? "is a child actor" or "was a child actor?"
Yes. The fact taht these are hard to express clearly is very telling.
What does it tell you?
Hollywood Walk of Fame: Ugh. High school dropouts: Ahm?
Dropped out of high school?
I guess <shrug>.
Erm, I mean, people will probably end up being "casual" with attributes...but if we could make the taxonomic classificatins a bit more firm...not sure what I'm getting at (it's late).
The easiest way to make them more firm is by making them self-explanatory. Otherwise it's not unreasonable for people to assume that a category is thematic.
It is. But "species" is not a genus. Like city is not a country.
Yes, but I'm not sure what you're point is - are you talking about "species" the article? Of course it shouldn't belong to "genus" the category...probably missing something.
Nevermind. It wasn't a great example, Europe-France-Paris was better.
I see two major problems with the status quo:
- multi-concept categories (American child actors) force us to maintain a
complex system of subcategories (but they paper over shortcoming in the software). The German WP shows it doesn't have to be this way, but it might be difficult to convince people on WP:en until Mediawiki can create intersections
Yay, how hard can it be?
Convincing or intersections? Hard enough, either way.
- categories with unclear relations that are used for everything
Like [[Category:Lasers]]? ;)
Exactly. If it was called [[Category:is a Laser]], there would be less confusion.
comes at a cost). However, we are dangerously close to inventing a poor man's version of a semantic wiki.
Would a fully fledged semantic wiki ever work on Wikipedia scale?
Of course. The question is not if, but when. Evaluating all relations and attributes on-the-fly may be way out there, but you could use it for offline-processing today, and that's what _you_ and many other people seem to be interested in.
Semantic Wiki does have challenges:
* The use needs to extend beyond nice statistics. Editors must see an immediate benefit. There are major concerns about hidden metadata that is invisible in the Wikipedia proper (unless you check the source, that is).
* It must try to prevent an ontology mess that we have with categories. It can't ever be the same mess by virtue of its very own nature, but you can for instance create confusion with "Relation:Is located in", "Relation:Located in", and "Relation:Has location".
Check out, for example: http://wiki.ontoworld.org/index.php/Help:Relation You will find it eerily familiar :-).
lack of intersections though. You know, what would be really awesome would be seeing at the bottom of each article:
Categories: Bridges, in France, built by Romans See other: Bridges in France (200 articles), Bridges built by Romans (137 articles), Bridges in France built by Romans (15 articles).
It does sound cool, but if you have a dozen categories on an article rather than three, you have more intersection categories than you want to put at the end of the article.
Is that feasible?
Not with the current mess, but other than that, I can't see why not.
woman chemist physicist polish (+ some more)
I guess splitting woman into person and female seemed too awkward to the Germans. Wimps.
Heh, what do they do for young girls?
Female child actors are tagged "Frau", "Kinderstar" ("woman", "child star"). So they use "woman" to mean "female human being" (even though Frau implies "adult", as "woman" does in English).
(who would have guessed that the German WP has an article about an American girl (born 1996) who played in a bunch of TV shows, including Startrek, while the English WP has no article? I am shocked, shocked I tell you!)
Roger