The alias namespace is a good idea, and I see the advantages.
However, a mechanism like that would have major consequences for some functions, especially the new ones, like "Most Wanted", "Orphans" etc. In the database, all articles carry a list of their outgoing links, which is updated upon saving the article. Now, if I look at the [[Elves]] link in [[Middle Earth]], I could either save the link [[Elves]], which would require cross-referncing articles while scanning through the links, which would render "Most Wanted" virtually unusable because of search times that are measured in hours... Or, I could save the link as [[Elves (Middle Earth)]], which would be plain wrong in case anyone edits the alias namespace article.
You see, this can get rather ugly. If you (or anyone!) have an idea of how to do this, or how to fix other bugs that come up along the way, there's a standing invitation to participate in development.
Any help would be appreciated, as my work schedule is rather tight at the moment.
Magnus
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com [mailto:wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com]On Behalf Of Mark Christensen Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2002 10:41 PM To: 'wikipedia-l@nupedia.com' Subject: RE: [Wikipedia-l] An alternative idea to resolve the [[Middle Earth]] issue
I think getting rid of the / is an important goal for Larry and others. So I'd change you system to use the new approved style:
Elves (Middle Earth)
The other question is what happens if we try to use this for something where there's likely to be a "real" article on the wikipedia which we might want to link to as well? Certainly there were "elves" in folklore before Middle Earth. My suggestion is that we could use some escape symbol to tell the system not to use the alias...
That said, this seems like the simplest suggestion so far for context sensitive linking. And conceivably the most flexible, because we could configure this to use nested alias namespaces. This means that we could put:
#alias [[Middle Earth]] #alias [[Fantasy Novel]] #alias [[Fantasy Movie]] #alias [[20th Century Novel]]
at the top of the page on The Fellowship of the Rings. And links on that page would look for a link to [[Elves]] first in the Middle Earth alias namespace (which might contain an alias for [[Elves of Middle Earth]], and then to the Fantasy Novel namespace which might also contain an alias for a general article on the history of the use of elfish characters in fantasy novels. And so on. At any point using the escape character before a link will skip out of all namespaces, and just point directly to the [[elves]] article.
Though nested namespaces is helpful in the case of self contained worlds, I expect that it would be almost necessary on pages like [[mitochondrial DNA]] where different sequences of DNA are used to mark off an amino acid when compared to those used in non-mitochondrial DNA. In other words one gene triplet (for example[[CTA]]) could mean something entirely different in the context of Mitochondrial DNA than it would outside that context. (Though I don't remember at all which triplets are actually different, I'm sure someone with a biology background would know this.) My point is that there are cases like this where nature is uses context sensitive namespaces, and it would be very helpful to be able to do the same in the wikipedia software.
And of course things like the [[poker]] pages would benefit by something like this as [[stud]] means something entirely different in poker, construction, and animal breeding contexts.
Any Object Oriented programmer knows that nested namespaces are a very useful tool for keeping large projects with many programmers working smoothly. As long as data is properly encapsulated, there's no need to know what variable names are being used elsewhere. And I think the same thing will be true in the wikipedia. Someone writing an article on construction shouldn't have to know that there's and article named [[stud (poker)]], another article named [[stud (construction)]] as well as one named [[stud (horses)]], and yet a fourth named [[stud (breeding]], they should just be able to write [[stud]] and have their article point to the correct page.
Just a few thoughts...
Yours Mark
-----Original Message----- From: Uri Yanover [mailto:uriyan_subscribe@yahoo.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2002 2:34 PM To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Subject: [Wikipedia-l] An alternative idea to resolve the [[Middle Earth]] issue
Hi everyone again,
Having thought some more about how it is possible to make editing [[Middle Earth]] easier once again, I've invented another solution to the problem: aliases.
Here's how it should work: we create a new Alias namespace. Inside it we'd have entries like [[Alias:Middle Earth]]. This page would look like the following:
Bilbo Middle Earth/Bilbo Faramir Middle Earth/Faramir Frodo Middle Earth/Frodo Gandalf Middle Earth/Gandalf
In general, the idea would be to match the ad-hoc "short" versions of the page titles to the "long" version. Each page that that would want to use the alias, will have to include a directive, explicitly telling it to, e.g. #alias [[Middle Earth]].
This way we could both keep the longer (and the more informative) names like [[Middle Earth/Elrond]] and still make short linking (like [[Elrond]]) possible from the pages that require this.
What do you think about it?
Uri Yanover[Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l [Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l