Categories were introduced in 2003 and are celebrating their 8th anniversary this year.
One thing that I would like to do in Wikipedia is:
A category that spans a scale, e.g. people by date of birth. Today we use [[Category:1823 births]] to group people born in that year, where the category page has links to the previous and next year, and possibly to supercategories by decade or century. I would like to index people by birth *date* along a timeline, from where any subsection could be listed. Some kind of {{#select: ...}} could be used to find a subsection from this index. Instead of category pages, some continuously scrolling page should be used. Just like Google Maps, when you scroll one way, new content should be retrieved by API, and presented in the same Javascript scrolling page. Maybe "category" is the wrong word to describe this function, but today we use categories because we have no better way. A possible extension is 2-dimensional ranges, for geographic coordinates.
Does any extension like this already exist?
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 5:48 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Does any extension like this already exist?
Semantic MediaWiki
-Chad
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 11:09 PM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 5:48 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Does any extension like this already exist?
Semantic MediaWiki
I call overkill :-)
Template parameters are a good place to start, we should just use them better. Example: {{Persondata}} on de.wikipedia, aggregated and updated continuously, leads to things like: http://toolserver.org/~apper/pd/person/Jimmy_Wales
Over 380.000 biographies from German Wikipedia, with parsed dates (where possible), places, etc.
Displaying the data (on a timeline etc) is rather trivial once the data is available in machine-readable form.
Magnus
Hoi, Templates are waiting for the kill. They are hard to use. They are horrible to maintain. Semantic MediaWiki is something that I do and can understand.
I do agree that a kill is called for and it is those horrid templates. Thanks, GerardM
On 11 May 2011 00:13, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 11:09 PM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 5:48 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Does any extension like this already exist?
Semantic MediaWiki
I call overkill :-)
Template parameters are a good place to start, we should just use them better. Example: {{Persondata}} on de.wikipedia, aggregated and updated continuously, leads to things like: http://toolserver.org/~apper/pd/person/Jimmy_Wales
Over 380.000 biographies from German Wikipedia, with parsed dates (where possible), places, etc.
Displaying the data (on a timeline etc) is rather trivial once the data is available in machine-readable form.
Magnus
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* Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com [Thu, 12 May 2011 11:52:20 +0200]:
Hoi, Templates are waiting for the kill. They are hard to use. They are horrible to maintain. Semantic MediaWiki is something that I do and can understand.
I do agree that a kill is called for and it is those horrid templates.
Templates are powerful and useful. Though I agree that syntax could be better: large amount of nested curly braces are poorly readable. However, it is amazing what could be achieved with these, for example look at templates / edits of User:Patrick at meta.
I like SMW, too. I use it for a small project right now, after a break of more than a year. They have implemented handy #set and #declare functions these days, better ways to store records (structured data) and so on (I still haven't checked everything). Current major rewrite should improve the performance using dedicated triple stores, instead of MySQL backend. Dmitriy
On 05/11/2011 12:09 AM, Chad wrote:
Semantic MediaWiki
Do you have a URL where I can see this scrolling?
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 6:22 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
On 05/11/2011 12:09 AM, Chad wrote:
Semantic MediaWiki
Do you have a URL where I can see this scrolling?
I don't know specifically, but I know SMW could track the sort of data you're looking for, and UI gadgets could be built to use that API data like you suggested.
-Chad
* Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se [2011-05-11 00:23]:
On 05/11/2011 12:09 AM, Chad wrote:
Semantic MediaWiki
Do you have a URL where I can see this scrolling?
See http://www.techpresentations.org/Conferences for an example; it is linked to from http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Result_Formats/timeline_and... which documents the timeline feature.
Best regards Thomas Bleher
On 5/10/2011 5:48 PM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
One thing that I would like to do in Wikipedia is:
A category that spans a scale, e.g. people by date of birth. Today we use [[Category:1823 births]] to group people born in that year, where the category page has links to the previous and next year, and possibly to supercategories by decade or century.
This gets to one of the big missing pieces of the semantic web, in my mind. I call them parametrized categories.
Let :L be some topic in DBpedia, and assume it's not one of the 1% or so bogus topics like "List of X"
If there is :L, then there's also a category which is :Books_About(:L) and if :P is a person, then there is :People_Who_Dated(:P). Then there are categories like :Metals_That_Melt_Between(1000C,1000C) and of course Union(:C1,:C2), Intersection(:C1,:C2)
It's all very nice but at some point you want to be reasoning about things rather than materializing zillions of categories that somebody might care about. Take a look at the bottom of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schwarzenegger
if you want to see the agony of Wikipedia categories. I mean, yikes! Why is one thing there and not another thing?
Once we've made the sin of materializing Intersection(c:American,c:Actor,c:Politician) why don't we also materialize Intersection(c:Actor,c:Politician,c:Athlete) and all the other combinations of the attributes that :Arnold_Schwarzenegger has?
What's particularly infuriating is that the categories are a badly denormalized rats nest. Is there some robot that goes around making sure that people who have a birth date in 1947 get listed in :1947_births and not in :1948_births? Wouldn't it make more sense to just code the birth date in a controlled manner and generate the birth year 'categories' on the fly?
And don't get me started on how the categories don't tile together. A few years back I wanted to make a list of automotive nameplates (c:Toyota_Corolla, c:Chevy_Mailbu) but there's no category that these all are in. You might find c:Models_of_Toyota_Cars, and c:Front_Wheel_Drive_Cars and c:Cars_That_From_A_Long_Distance_Look_Like_Flies and you need to merge these together and still edit out things that don't belong.) What a mess!
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Paul Houle paul@ontology2.com wrote:
On 5/10/2011 5:48 PM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
One thing that I would like to do in Wikipedia is:
A category that spans a scale, e.g. people by date of birth. Today we use [[Category:1823 births]] to group people born in that year, where the category page has links to the previous and next year, and possibly to supercategories by decade or century.
This gets to one of the big missing pieces of the semantic web, in my mind. I call them parametrized categories.
Let :L be some topic in DBpedia, and assume it's not one of the 1% or so bogus topics like "List of X"
If there is :L, then there's also a category which is :Books_About(:L) and if :P is a person, then there is :People_Who_Dated(:P). Then there are categories like :Metals_That_Melt_Between(1000C,1000C) and of course Union(:C1,:C2), Intersection(:C1,:C2)
It's all very nice but at some point you want to be reasoning about things rather than materializing zillions of categories that somebody might care about. Take a look at the bottom of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schwarzenegger
if you want to see the agony of Wikipedia categories. I mean, yikes! Why is one thing there and not another thing?
Once we've made the sin of materializing Intersection(c:American,c:Actor,c:Politician) why don't we also materialize Intersection(c:Actor,c:Politician,c:Athlete) and all the other combinations of the attributes that :Arnold_Schwarzenegger has?
What's particularly infuriating is that the categories are a badly denormalized rats nest. Is there some robot that goes around making sure that people who have a birth date in 1947 get listed in :1947_births and not in :1948_births? Wouldn't it make more sense to just code the birth date in a controlled manner and generate the birth year 'categories' on the fly?
And don't get me started on how the categories don't tile together. A few years back I wanted to make a list of automotive nameplates (c:Toyota_Corolla, c:Chevy_Mailbu) but there's no category that these all are in. You might find c:Models_of_Toyota_Cars, and c:Front_Wheel_Drive_Cars and c:Cars_That_From_A_Long_Distance_Look_Like_Flies and you need to merge these together and still edit out things that don't belong.) What a mess!
One of the advantages of using SMW over the present category structure would be to end the continual argumentation about what sorts of cross-categories are acceptable---in particular, to use the example of people, whether they should be categorized by ethnicity - profession intersections, e.g., American Jewish athletes. Unimaginable rancour arises from such discussions--see WP:Categories for Discussion at the enWP for examples.
At present they decision of whether or not to make a category is decided by the vague concept of presumed usefulness together with the inapplicable one of political correctness; there would be much to be gained by letting the user combine anything they might happen to want on the fly rather than have these pre-determined.
I wrote:
One thing that I would like to do in Wikipedia is:
A category that spans a scale, e.g. people by date of birth.
Thinking of it, here's what we could do:
Allow a category page to specify how many items should be listed per page, instead of the default 200. Maybe some categories are better off with 50 or 500.
Allow a category page to specify how items should be listed by naming a template, to which both the item (page name) and sort key should be submitted.
Allow a category page to specify what datatype the sort key is. In addition to the default alphabetic, numeric values and dates could be very useful. Both ascending (normal) and descending (reverse) sorting should also be possible to specify.
E.g. for a category "bridges by length", the category page might contain:
{| class="wikitable sortable" |- ! Length (metres) !! Bridge {{#Category: sort="numeric descending"|template=mybridge|perpage=100}} |}
The idea here is that, given two bridges, the wiki would generate the category page as:
{| class="wikitable sortable" |- ! Bridge !! Length (metres) {{mybridge|2737.4|Golden Gate Bridge}} {{mybridge|1825|Brooklyn Bridge}} |}
And Template:mybridge could be defined by the user as
|- | [[{{{2}}}]] | <table><tr><td align=center width={{#expr:{{{1}}}/10}}px bgcolor=lightgreen>{{{1}}}</td></tr></table>
Here, the <table> inside the table cell makes a bar graph representing the length by 273 pixels for the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, and 182 pixels for the length of the Brooklyn Bridge.
An example is shown at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:LA2
Possibly, the template should also receive, as another parameter, the distance to the next sort key, which could be useful for placing items on a scale.
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