Erik Moeller wrote:
Thoughts? Objections? I consider implementing this
myself if nobody cares
enough to do it.
I think there are some problems with the idea of creating a separate
category namespace.
(1) It creates an ambiguation problem. For example, should an article
about "events in U.S. history" appear in the main Wikipedia namespace
or in the the "category" namespace?
(2) It could fragment the Wikipedia. All of the other namespaces --
Talk, User, Wikipedia, etc. -- serve some sort of "meta" function
with respect to the actual "encyclopedia" part of Wikipedia, so it
makes sense to compartmentalize them in a separate namespace. This
isn't the case with "category" articles, which are themselves part of
the encyclopedia.
(3)
In addition to these problems, creating a category namespace only
provides limited utility. Thinking ahead a bit, I think something
more flexible and powerful would better serve the project as it grows
and matures. Rather than simply creating a category namespace, I
think it would be better to develop a system of object typing like
the one I described awhile ago. The Wiki syntax could be expanded to
include ways of marking object types and properties, which could then
be used in turn to support data mining. For example, if we had a way
of marking certain articles as "people" objects with properties such
as first name, last name, date of birth, etc., the software could
autogenerate lists of people sorted either alphabetically or by date
of birth. Also, the autogenerated lists could include selected
properties extracted from each of the articles in the list. Here's
some pseudocode to give an idea of how someone might generate a list
of U.S. presidents:
<LIST ORDER=year of inauguration>*'''[U.S.
President->name]''', [U.S.
President->year of inauguration], [U.S. President->party affiliation]
</LIST>
The idea is that this would expand to the equivalent of:
*'''James Earl Carter''', 1976, Democrat
*'''Ronald Wilson Reagan''', 1980, Republican
*'''George Herbert Walker Bush''', 1988, Republican
*'''William Jefferson Clinton''', 1992, Democrat
*'''George W. Bush''', 2000, Republican
This sort of thing could be coded into Wikipedia with an object
model, but I don't see how creating a category namespace would make
it possible.
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (
www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------