The Cunctator wrote:
We actually did have a big discussion about this and film ended up being nixed because of the problem of digital videa replacing actual film as the medium for "films". Thus, "movie".
That's one minor reason (but that convention was written sometime in the UseMod days - well before digital movies were widely available in movie theaters). Another is that the word "film" is often applied selectively (in at least the United States) to movies that are considered to be of a higher caliber. Thus, to many people, all films are movies but not all movies are films.
However, it basically comes down to this - we had to choose something to serve as a standard disambiguating term just as we had to choose one format to have all the day articles reside at.
Disambiguation is aimed at resolving ambiguities and having both "film" and "movie" exist side by side is inconsistent - creating ambiguity.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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Daniel Mayer wrote:
Disambiguation is aimed at resolving ambiguities and having both "film" and "movie" exist side by side is inconsistent - creating ambiguity.
I agree. Having a standard is more important than which particular standard.
Another aspect of this, apart from disambiguation, is that identifying all motion pictures as (film) or (movie), even when there is no ambiguity, is that this "meta-data" could be used later on to extract a portion of our data for a movie history project or similar.
One reason we've been successful is that we didn't get bogged down in a priori design before we just plunged in like maniacs and started writing an encyclopedia. But at the same time, looking forward, we will likely someday want to come up with ways for people to usefully (and SIMPLY!!!!) put some structure on the data.
It'd be nice to be able to do a query and pull out all biographies, for example, or all countries, or all movies, or all dog breeds. Not so nice that we should get all bogged down in debates about the perfect system, but nice enough that we should think about how conventions can help us move in that direction gracefully.
--Jimbo
On Thursday 01 May 2003 20:54, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Another aspect of this, apart from disambiguation, is that identifying all motion pictures as (film) or (movie), even when there is no ambiguity, is that this "meta-data" could be used later on to extract a portion of our data for a movie history project or similar.
I thought about this possibility too and think it has lots of potential.
[snip]
It'd be nice to be able to do a query and pull out all biographies, for example, or all countries, or all movies, or all dog breeds. Not so nice that we should get all bogged down in debates about the perfect system, but nice enough that we should think about how conventions can help us move in that direction gracefully.
I agree. Categorizing the data, could also be useful for automatically generating overview lists like [[List of movies]], [[List of mathematicans]] etc. which are often incomplete and hard to maintain.
Perhaps the "meta-data" could be added in a similar way as it is done for the international webpages. For instance on the page for "Javan Tiger" one would add [[category:tiger]] in the very beginning. This information could be expanded in a "wordnet" like way, e.g. see
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn1.7.1?stage=2&word=tiger&am...
such that the "Javan Tiger" would automatically appear in the "list of mammals".
For what it is worth,
Marco