RE: [Wikipedia-l] Forget dmoz, viva "Wikirectory"!

criticism I would say "misunderstood" rather than "refuted", but that's not important. 1. Non-natural language text should be avoided at all costs. It goes part and parcel with the principles of the simplicity of the wiki syntax. 2. Any such meta-data scheme should not be stored within the article text. If it's being parsed so that it displays in a separate edit window, then it should be saved as a separate field/table in the database. That is to say, although I strongly think that such a categorization scheme should be an explicitly separate project from the core Wikipedia project--and in fact, a separate core project (let's call it Nupedia) tied to the Wikipedia database which focussed on organization, formatting, culling, etc. of the Wikipedia entries for such purposes as creating paper versions sould be an excellent idea--if it is going to happen as part of the core Wikipedia project, the scheme should at all costs be separated from the article text and should be ignorable on both the viewing and editing side if desired. 3. Any official sanction of a particular implementation for dealing with categorization makes it orders less likely that the adoption of a better scheme in the future will happen than the case in which we explicitly design the system to be implementation-agnostic. 3. Another basic issue with the implementation of such a categorization scheme, which could be a problem if not well recognized, and I haven't seen any thoughtful recognition of it (yet--and I may be looking in the wrong places) is that it provides an alternate method of interlinking entries which could harm the quality of the construction of the entries. Whenever you add stuff to a machine, you make it less efficient. You can't just stick wings onto a car to make a super flying automobile. You don't make a combination toaster-blender. Dictionaries and encyclopedias are separate things. Web browsers make bad file browsers. Etc. It's so much easier to add stuff when you're dealing with code than when you're dealing with physical machines that it's hard to remember that the dangers of decreased utility are still there.