I noticed that the Lattice entry lumps together 3 different senses of the word "Lattice". I believe these should be separate entries for each *sense*: [[Lattice algebraic structure]], [[Lattice in material science]] etc.
Then there should be a disambiguation page that explains that in the context of algebra, the word "lattice" means [[Lattice algebraic structure]], in the context of material science it means [[Lattice in material science]] etc. In general, I think that we should not get distracted by the fact that such entries are grouped together in traditional printed encyclopedias; this appears to be an artifact of the primitive lookup operation used in that case.
I would even go as far as marking specially the pages whose primary purpose is to map words to senses. The reason is the following potential useful enhancement of wikipedia. Image that *every* sense used in wikipedia article has an entry in wikipedia (or wiktionary). Then one could build an interactive tool that would help replace every occurrence of a word in an article with a unique sense of that word. Therefore, all words would have unambiguous meaning. This might not seem like a great advantage for human readers, but I believe that wikipedia has a large potential for automated processing.
Viktor
Sounds good, so I suppose the page [[lattice]] would be a disambiguation page pointing to the other articles and explaining the different way the concept is used.
Not sure how one would link to seperate wiktionary articles though. I think wiktionary works best if we put it all on one page if we can, but your idea might justify more separation so that a link from a specialized use of a word in wikipedia could link back to the correct dictionary definition (in fact every word in an article could, but we're not ready for that).
A lot of the hassles arise from ambiguity about what sense of a word is being used, See the history of [[reality]].
Fred
I noticed that the Lattice entry lumps together 3 different senses of the word "Lattice". I believe these should be separate entries for each *sense*: [[Lattice algebraic structure]], [[Lattice in material science]] etc.
Then there should be a disambiguation page that explains that in the context of algebra, the word "lattice" means [[Lattice algebraic structure]], in the context of material science it means [[Lattice in material science]] etc. In general, I think that we should not get distracted by the fact that such entries are grouped together in traditional printed encyclopedias; this appears to be an artifact of the primitive lookup operation used in that case.
I would even go as far as marking specially the pages whose primary purpose is to map words to senses. The reason is the following potential useful enhancement of wikipedia. Image that *every* sense used in wikipedia article has an entry in wikipedia (or wiktionary). Then one could build an interactive tool that would help replace every occurrence of a word in an article with a unique sense of that word. Therefore, all words would have unambiguous meaning. This might not seem like a great advantage for human readers, but I believe that wikipedia has a large potential for automated processing.
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