On 10/26/07, Rolf Lampa rolf.lampa@rilnet.com wrote:
Correct. And this is why I think it's a bit unfortunate that the entire WP is saturated with phonetic redirects (which seems to be a big part of the redirects). The phonetic part should have been taken care of "at the root of the tree", that is, in the search mechanism.
You can't solve everything in search, at the moment, because links require actual destinations. Arguably, it would be better if the linking process went something like:
- Write "...[[Gary Smith]]..." in some wikitext. - Press preview (or perhaps even save) - All ambiguous links (anything that doesn't point to an actual, non-dab page) are highlighted somehow - For each link, choose from amongst a small number of possible real locations ("Did you mean ''Gary Smith (footballer), Scottish footballer'', "Gary Smith (Kittian footballer), footballer from St Kitts and Nevis"...?. Links that point to redirects would be automatically updated but shown for approval. - Save with perfect, non-ambiguous links.
You know, if we assume that wikitext links always point to the actual page, then that does make life easier, because we can use the same searching mechanism at the time when a user searches for a page ("Hey, I'm looking for info on Gary Smith"), as when an editor is linking to an article. That's a massive plus.
Then our problem basically boils down to: how do we implement the best search ever, by using human-edited hints?
However, there is a difference, the Aliases would, as opposed to the existing redirects, be defined inside of the article instead of outside, and that opens up interesting perspectives, especially if
Yes. Redirects are painful partially because they're external. Centralised management is good.
changing the term to *Synonyms* instead of Aliases. I like the term
"Synonyms" better because it implies supporting also human reading with more info (more than aliases does).
It strikes me as a bit too fuzzy, personally, and could lead to people adding a lot of terms that no one would actually be searching for. Nicknames, epithets, insults, etc. But it will do for now, if you like.
Therefore, in summary, I suggest Soundex (or modern derivations thereof, perhaps as part of the search mechanism - entirely automated though), and the concept of Synonyms to support a wider range of application than Aliases implies (the term "alias" is rather abstract and not very meaningful to most people). With an appropriate
You keep bringing up Soundex. I'm not sure how it's useful, other than as a last ditch resort. "Uh, we don't have a page called John Barrnes. We don't have a disambiguation page called John Barrnes. We don't even have any pages with synonyms of John Barrnes. Any chance you meant John Barnes?" Let's just leave Soundex out for the moment.
implementation* of a Synonyms concept, parsers and both internal and
external Indexers could benefit from this info while at the same time it would potentially increase the informational value for human reading as well, especially if displayed** near the top of the article.
Yes, I like the idea of an article showing you explicitly "This article covers the following topics".
Though that itself raises the question of how to handle a topic which is dealt with in several places, such as when you have a summary on one page and a detailed account on another. A smart dynamic disambiguation system could deal with this: search for "US History" and get "United States (summary)", "History of the United States (detailed)" plus links to portals etc.
Steve