[Wikipedia-l] concepts vs. words

[Viktor Kuncak]

I noticed that the Lattice entry lumps together 3 different senses
of the word "Lattice".  I believe these should be separate entries
for each *sense*: [[Lattice algebraic structure]],
[[Lattice in material science]] etc.

Then there should be a disambiguation page that explains
that in the context of algebra, the word "lattice" means
[[Lattice algebraic structure]], in the context of material
science it means [[Lattice in material science]] etc.  In
general, I think that we should not get distracted by the
fact that such entries are grouped together in traditional
printed encyclopedias; this appears to be an artifact of the
primitive lookup operation used in that case.

I would even go as far as marking specially the pages whose
primary purpose is to map words to senses.  The reason is
the following potential useful enhancement of wikipedia.
Image that *every* sense used in wikipedia article has an
entry in wikipedia (or wiktionary).  Then one could build an
interactive tool that would help replace every occurrence of
a word in an article with a unique sense of that word.
Therefore, all words would have unambiguous meaning.  This
might not seem like a great advantage for human readers, but
I believe that wikipedia has a large potential for automated
processing.

  Viktor