Michael Dale wrote:
hmm ... my feeling is that it would be easier to adapt semantic wiki to include language aliasing than adapt omega wiki to be less dictionary centric
Suddenly we're discussing the Total Makeover of Wikipedia instead of small, incremental improvements. That's precisely the opposite of my intention with starting this thread.
My question was: When you copy an idea, a thought pattern, from another language of Wikipedia, or when you want to do so, how do you find these ideas worth copying?
I'm talking here about things you *can* do because others have already done them. I'm not talking about introducing Semantic Mediawiki or Omegawiki or how everything could have been different if only the software was written in Java or Fortran. Because such big changes are very unlikely to happen. Some of them might happen (SUL happened) but it takes time, and it only happens to very few of the very big ideas.
Yesterday, in my language of Wikipedia (Swedish), I went through all of our categories for countries, and made sure that if we do have a category for its nationality (for category:Russia, we also have a category:Russians), that this also was a subcategory both of the country and of Category:People by nation. The latter category increased from 185 to 202 subcategories. There's no automatic tool to help me in this, as far as I know, but it was only some 400 categories to click through, and some 25 I needed to edit, and it could all be done in one evening. That's a small but important improvement.
Some might say that with the magic Semantic whatever, this problem would never happen, it would solve itself. The problem is that *you* don't have the power to make that improvement in one evening, and I *had* the power to do something in one evening.
The day before, I used Multichill's tool to suggest interwiki links (http://toolserver.org/~multichill/suggest_interwiki.php) between subcategories of all categories named "...by country". I did this for Swedish and for Nynorsk, connecting them to English. I found dozens new interwiki connections between categories, and later used my bot account to fill in the missing parts of the interwiki web.
These are two recipies for how you can improve your language version of Wikipedia in an evening. But we don't have any cookbook to collect all such recipies, do we? Should we? These two recipies have now been used for the Swedish Wikipedia and we don't need to follow them again. But they can be reused on every other language. That's the interwiki experience exchange that I intended this thread to be about.