[Foundation-l] Project Proposal: Wikiscope

[Erik Moeller]

On 6/12/06, Daniel Bregman <dbmag9 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Please take a look at my proposal at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiscope and leave your comments and
> suggestions.

I think that the need you are trying to address is best met by first
improving the existing interlanguage and interwiki link functionality.
For instance, if we know that an article in de: and en: refer to the
same concept, and the de: version links to a category on Commons, then
in most cases, the en: version should have the same link. Currently,
this has to be manually added, just like the interlanguage links have
to be manually copied from wiki to wiki.

In the long run, we should try to use a large, collaboratively
maintained ontology as a basic vocabulary for connecting related
concepts in the different Wikimedia projects. The WiktionaryZ project
(wiktionaryz.org) seeks to build such an ontology, but there are also
attempts to bootstrap it by using existing Wikipedia semantic
information as a source (I believe User:Duesentrieb is doing this for
his diploma thesis).

Essentially, in the ideal vision, you would connect an article from
Wikipedia, an image from Commons, a Wikinews story etc. to similar or
identical concepts in the ontology. You could then use the ontology
itself to navigate to the various outside resources that refer to
individual entities therein.

I find it unlikely that a "Wikiscope" project could provide anything
that the combination of project-internal portals and ontology-based
connections between related pages could not provide.

Erik