The #PARENT and #CHILD discussion is making my system designer's
skin crawl. I already said this once at
http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-November/000764.html,
but indulge me as I me repeat it again:
I would like to see wiki software that allows for enumeration
of generic terms that would trigger navigation links to
appear on article pages automatically. It's a natural
consequence of [[Wikipedia is not paper|Wikipedia not being
paper]]. Using the baseball articles as examples, "baseball"
should be tagged as one of those generic terms. Then any page
with "baseball" in the title would get a link to the
[[Baseball]] article, and the [[Baseball]] article would list
links to all the other baseball articles.
Now, allow me to elaborate.
Let's create a page in the new wiki called [[special:generic
terms]]. Then we simply edit that page and add generic terms to
the list -- a simple enumeration of [[free links]] like this:
[[World War II]]
[[Baseball]]
[[Afghanistan]]
[[Colorado]]
etc.
This effectively defines the set of articles that are "parent"
articles.
So all pages listed on this special page are handled specially by the
wiki software. If you edit [[Baseball]], the software looks up all
articles that have the generic term "baseball" in the
title. (Encyclopedias are distinguished by their meaningful titles, so
this shouldn't be a problem -- regardless of whether the page is
[[History of Baseball]] or [[Baseball History]].) Back to the
example. The software finds all articles whose titles include
"baseball," and the [[Baseball]] article gets an automatic link to
them. Job done. Similarly, the [[History of Baseball]] page gets an
automatic
link to [[Baseball]] ''because'' we put [[Baseball]] on the
[[special:generic terms]] page. No one has to remember to add #PARENT
and (aack) #CHILD links. It's all associated automatically by
''title'' with the simple addition to a list of generic terms--terms
which
have so far tempted people to create subpages.
This works nicely for [[Colorado Springs]] (by an accident of
naming) but also for [[Denver, Colorado]]. Because both have
"Colorado" in their title, they are flagged as "children" of
[[Colorado]], and [[Colorado]] would automatically be updated to
link to them when these new "child" page titles are defined.
Ah, but it breaks down when you want to write an article called
[[Battle of Britain]] or [[D Day]], doesn't it? No World War II
to be found in those titles. (Both are better encyclopedia titles
than [[World War II/Battle of Britain]] and [[World War II/D
Day]] IMHO.) So let's add another intuitive feature to the wiki
software: a "see also" section. Let's say the convention is that
in any article, all [[free links]] that appear between the words
"see also:" on themselves on a line (the Perl regexp is /^see
also:$/i) and a horizontal line will be indexed sort of like
children as well.
So [[Battle of Britain]] would look this:
The '''Battle of Britain''' began on August [[1940]]. [sic]
After the [[France|French]] collapsed under the [[Blitzkrieg]]...
...
See also:
[[World War II]]
----
Then any article mentioned in any other article's "see also"
section would receive preferential treatment in the backlink
feature that I mentioned in
http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-November/000751.html.
The backlink on each article page could have a very intuitive
name, like "Show all articles that mention this one." Then you
get the list in two sections. If you clicked on it for [[World
War II]], the first section would be intuitively titled, "All
Articles that Refer to "World War II" In the See Also Section"),
and the second section would be titled, "All Articles that Refer
to "World War II" Anywhere in the Body of the Article").
These two techniques are both intuitive and relatively easy to
implement in wiki software.
<>< [[tbc]]