[Mediawiki-l] idea: Wiki-Index

[Martin Jambon]

That would certainly be an excellent thing to have, but I see 2 
difficulties:
- readability: manual annotations in the source code make it much more 
difficult to read (it's easier to do it once the document is frozen, 
which never happens in wikis). It's a bit like hyperlinks.
- quality: I am afraid that automatic indexing would not be better 
than a Google search, but if authors have do it manually, it's hard to 
maintain.

So I am not sure that indexing for web documents is as useful as in books 
due to the presence of hyperlinks :-)

my 2 cents

Martin

On Wed, 11 Jan 2006, András Kardos wrote:

> An idea. I'll try to be short.
>
> Wikipedia has a lot of information, and it is heavily crosslinked. But it's not
> indexed. I mean an index of people, and index of places and an index of things.
> And events. And countries. And lakes. And whatever. Each index is a table (in
> database terms), with a few required fields. You could the add a page (or a part
> of it) to an index (or more indexes) by specifying theese required fields of an
> index (probably in the wiki source). The MediaWiki software would create real
> database tables based on this information.
>
> Using this you could look up things/people that happened, borned, died or
> whatever on a given day. Or things that happened in Tokyo, or in 1923, and put
> that on a Google Map. Look at Wikipedia as an intelligent "who's who" (searching
> not only by name). Or list books or movies that have wiki pages about them.
> Possibilities are quite broad. Look up pages that are in multiple indexes,
> "events" and "presidents of the world" for example.
>
> "indexers" would be wikipedians who index things. Make and index, like
> "countries" or "operating systems" or "mysteries". And then collect things into
> that index. And specify the attributes (database fields) of that index. There
> are pages like this, I know, for database systems for example, but you see this
> is a different level. You could create an index of abbreviations for example...
>
> (I don't have much time to discuss it, but if anyone finds it worth working on,
> please let me know. Later I might join in. Have a nice day.)
>
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--
Martin Jambon, PhD
http://martin.jambon.free.fr

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