[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia - An infinite number of lists

[David Gerard]

On 24/03/07, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:

> In the fullness of time, Wikipedia or some fork of it will be
> properly semantic, with a nice query interface that will let you
> ask questions like "what are all the birds native to the Chicago
> area?".  In the meantime, people interested in such categorization
> have little choice but to create these explicit categories and
> lists, silly and overspecific though they sometimes seem to be.
> I don't see much harm in this, other than the dreadful waste of
> time (compared to, say, the time that could be spent implementing
> a proper semantic scheme once and for all) and the inevitable
> incompleteness and inaccuracy of the explicit lists.


Indeed. Note how a lot of lists were made more or less superfluous by
the category feature. Lists these days need to be of value by order
and/or annotation.


- d.