Hello, I regularly read and contribute to Wikipedia under the name Iammaxus.  Over the last few weeks, I have been mulling over an idea on how to significantly improve the mediawiki project.  I posted the following on my user page before finding and reading this mailing list only to find out that this idea has been discussed here (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-December/007185.html), albeit not with the scale that I'm imagining   Because im not sure where to put this in the metawiki, and im not sure if anyone would care if I did, here is an excerpt from a conversation i had with a friend of mine knowledgeable in computer science on 12/24/03 (note that I wasn't seriously asking him to do this, just more of bouncing an idea of off him):

I Am MAXUS (2:30:14 PM): yo

Chin Jut: hi

I Am MAXUS: code a meta data system for wikipedia

Chin Jut: what's that mean?

I Am MAXUS: i can't even begin to imagine the possibilities

I Am MAXUS: well first off

I Am MAXUS: organize topics

I Am MAXUS: in a tree system

I Am MAXUS: this would be part of the meta data system

I Am MAXUS: well wiat

I Am MAXUS: lemme start from the beginning Chin Jut: ok

I Am MAXUS: the overall point is to allow more machine generated info, stuff that shouldnt be manually made like it is now, or even with one time use scripts

I Am MAXUS: such as lists of articles

I Am MAXUS: tables of dates

Chin Jut: alright

Chin Jut: "List of famous bears", that sorta thing

I Am MAXUS: but much greater than taht

Chin Jut: alright

I Am MAXUS: so u could just request a list of a certain sub tree

I Am MAXUS: etc

I Am MAXUS: then it would have more specific meta data

I Am MAXUS: such as meta data about books including the author and such

I Am MAXUS: so that this would automatically be put into an article about the book

Chin Jut: ok

I Am MAXUS: so:

I Am MAXUS: ?

I Am MAXUS: go

I Am MAXUS: ]and do it

Chin Jut: well, gee

Chin Jut: that's a large project

Chin Jut: I'm not even sure what to begin with

Chin Jut: I mean, what features need to be available?

Chin Jut: (I'm not gonna be able to do this, why am I talking?)

Chin Jut: what, concretely, needs to be done? I Am MAXUS: good question

I Am MAXUS: well first of all, learn xml and shit

I Am MAXUS: cause thats how all this junk is done

I Am MAXUS: or somethintg

I Am MAXUS: lol

Chin Jut: But Tim Sweeney speaks disparagingly of XML...

I Am MAXUS: does he? Chin Jut: yeah

I Am MAXUS: what does he say is bad about it?

Chin Jut: lemme see if I can find it

Chin Jut: "Does anyone else see XML as an overcomplicated solution the meager problem of serializing data in and out of text files?"

Chin Jut: Philip Wadler (one of the main guys behind Haskell) also bashes XML: "So the essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well."

Chin Jut: All the same, yeah, I'll learn XML

I Am MAXUS: lol

I Am MAXUS: well screw those guys

I Am MAXUS: cause everyone is using it

Chin Jut: yeah

Chin Jut: Phil Wadler goes on to say

I Am MAXUS: waht does he mean "serializing data..."?

Chin Jut: It's worth studying XML just because it became popular while better things did not

Chin Jut: Serializing data means writing it and reading it from files

Chin Jut: you take a complicated structure, like a tree

Chin Jut: and turn it into some linear sequence of bytes

Chin Jut: hence, you've turned it into a series... you've serialized it

I Am MAXUS: right

I Am MAXUS: anyway i dont know if u can usel xml

I Am MAXUS: because of the database based nature of it

I Am MAXUS: but something similar

I Am MAXUS: anyway

I Am MAXUS: i dont know about searching, and thats the main function of this system

I Am MAXUS: so u have to figure out how to do that

I Am MAXUS: so each article has info attached to it

I Am MAXUS: ideally, the types of info could be specified by ppl in a realtively plain language way

I Am MAXUS: so taht ppl could specify more types of meatadata for certain types of files

Chin Jut: what types of metadata would people specify?

Chin Jut: Like "this article is about bears"?

Chin Jut: Shouldn't that be auto-discovered by computers?

I Am MAXUS: thats beyond the scope of this

I Am MAXUS: that requires all sorts of human communication stuff

Chin Jut: ok

Chin Jut: so then what is this, exactly?

I Am MAXUS: i told you!

I Am MAXUS: for example, lets take the organism pages

Chin Jut: ok

I Am MAXUS: they all have the classification on the side

I Am MAXUS: well instead, each page would have a is a member of this higher group

I Am MAXUS: which wikipedia would look at

Chin Jut: I see

I Am MAXUS: and see what thats a memeber of

I Am MAXUS: and dynamically figure out the whole classifcation

I Am MAXUS: this is not such a useful example because its much more static

I Am MAXUS: but take the date pages, those are useful mommas to meta-fy

Chin Jut: ah

I Am MAXUS: so if a page is an event

Chin Jut: so people would have to say in the event

I Am MAXUS: it would include date info

I Am MAXUS: and type of event info

Chin Jut: "Date info: July 4, 1776"

I Am MAXUS: right

Chin Jut: and then the date page would say "Search for all pages with date info: July 4, 1776"

I Am MAXUS: so it coud be added to the "type of info in history" page

I Am MAXUS: that too

Chin Jut: "typo of info in history" page?

I Am MAXUS: well like the music in history page

I Am MAXUS: etxc

I Am MAXUS: etc

Chin Jut: ah

I Am MAXUS: so if u had a page that was under the music subtree

I Am MAXUS: and then under the band subtree

I Am MAXUS: and u had dates of existence of that band

I Am MAXUS: and then there could be an important concert subtree, etc

Chin Jut: well, to be technical, I don't think these are trees, I think they're DAGs

Chin Jut: but it doesn't matter

I Am MAXUS: dag?

Chin Jut: directed acyclic graph

Chin Jut: in a tree, a node has only one parent

Chin Jut: (at most)

I Am MAXUS: yeah good point

Chin Jut: ok, it's sorta interesting. I have no idea how to do it efficiently, though. But I think I might actually work on it

I Am MAXUS: lol

I Am MAXUS: i want to copy this conversation into the metawikipedia.org somewhere

I Am MAXUS: maybe in the todo for vers 4 or 5

Chin Jut: I want to eat breakfast, because I have yet to do so

Chin Jut: bbl

I Am MAXUS: bye

Chin Jut signed off at 2:48:15 PM.

Those are our AOL Instant Messenger screen names. His wikipedia name is Chinju

Thanks for reading this, I hope you consider this because I believe this idea has the potential to revolutionize not just the wikipedia, but all sorts of projects.