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.
Hi folks,
i wold like to clarify a few things :
i) When is the SQL Dump updated i.e Weekly / Fortnightly or what ???
ii) Are the Image files (*.jpg / *.png ) present in yhe cur table as seen in the cur_namespace =6 or is it just the title
iii) How are the Articles in the Encyclopedia classified i.e at the Database level or logical level or anything else.....
i would be glad if u could answer to these queries in detail....
regards
Rameez Don (rameezdon@gawab.com)
________________________________ 15 Mbytes Free Web-based and POP3 Sign up now: http://www.gawab.com
RameezDon wrote:
Hi folks,
Hiya. Please don't hit "reply" on messages you're not actually replying to. Thanks.
ii) Are the Image files (*.jpg / *.png ) present in yhe cur table as seen in the cur_namespace =6 or is it just the title
No, they're not. We are not clear on how to distribute the images, because not all of them are GFDL. Some are fair use and would be illegal for others to use for different purposes.
iii) How are the Articles in the Encyclopedia classified i.e at the Database level or logical level or anything else.....
I'm not sure what you mean by that. There are the namespaces that separate actual articles from Talk pages, Wikipedia-specific information, etc. The actual articles are in namespace 0.
Greetings, Timwi
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