Erik Moeller wrote:

I presume the conference where you heard about Wikipedia was the World- InfoCon. If so, did you by any chance hear about it on day two from Volker Grassmuck? He's a friend of mine, and a couple of weeks before the con he called me and asked me about cool projects in the area of collaborative journalism and peer-to-peer networks. I told him about Wikipedia, and he promised to bring it up at the conference. If that's where you heard about it, I can take at least some small credit for you being here now :-)

You're right, it was at the World-InfoCon, from Volker Grassmuck. Actually, though, several speakers at the conference talked about Wikipedia.

HTML anchors are not yet implemented, but this is a project I'd be willing to tackle. We just need a nifty syntax.

How about just including them with section headers? For example, take the following line of wiki syntax:

=== Geography and Climate ===

Right now this produces the following HTML:

<h3> Geography and Climate </h3>

It shouldn't take a lot of work to make the same wiki syntax produce the following HTML:

<a name="Geography_and_Climate"><h3> Geography and Climate </h3>

This implementation would only make it possible to insert HTML anchors at the beginning of section headers, but that should cover most of the places where people might want to have them. Then to create a hyperlink to the "Geography and Climate" section of the "Russia" article, you'd simply use the following syntax:

[[Russia#Geography and Climate]]

Do I understand you correctly when I assume that when you want a link like [[person:George W. Bush]], you want to later be able to link to this page by just using [[George W. Bush]], but use the "person" prefix during page creation to choose a proper template? In that case, the question would arise what would happen to this qualifier after the page has been created.

Yes, that's true. The specifics of my proposed implementation are half-baked. The broader concept, though, is the idea of being able to object-type articles as a way of imposing some kind of structure. Maybe this is just fundamentally antithetical to the free-form nature of Wikipedia, but I see that someone else is thinking along rather similar lines with the proposal for a "Slotipedia."