[Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

[Craig Franklin]

Scríobh Bryan Derksen:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jews
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1945_deaths
> The only one missing is "females" :)

Well, consider me schooled ;-)

But to show how this is inadequate, can you produce me a list of... say...
Polish-born Jewish authors who died in the United Kingdom in 1897?  That's
what I feel this tool would be really useful for, and the existing
categories system is pretty much inadequate for that (I suppose if you
looked at all of the relevant categories and returned a list of links that
appeared in EVERY one that'd work, but there's currently no tool for this,
and I imagine that it'd be fairly expensive in terms of CPU cycles.

I suppose that adding a tool that would do what I proposed above would be an
acceptable compromise, but I figure if we're going to do such a thing, then
we may as well do it properly ;-)

Scríobh Gregory Maxwell:

> Thats why it's a wiki...  "ordinary" user writes the page.. Omits the
> metadata, because they don't understand it, aren't aware of it, or
> just don't care.
>
> Someone else notices the missing metadata and adds it, ... and since
> they apparently care about metadata they probably known enough to do
> it right, even if the system turns out to be fairly complicated.
>
> The metadata for an article will likely change very slowly, if at all,
> so keeping the metadata accurate should be a non-issue.

Oh, I didn't mean it in the sense of "we should invent our own metadata
tagging scheme".  Such a thing would be overkill.  I think the best solution
would be to have a relatively simple tagging scheme like this:

[{Died: 1945}]
[{Nationality: Dutch}]
[{Religion: Jew}]
[{Profession: Author}]

...and then automagically convert that into RDF, or some other mutually
agreed-upon metadata scheme.  That way casual writers don't have to worry
about the intricate details of such a system, and anyone who wants to get at
the actual real RDF can, presumably through a direct database call of some
description.  Of course, I know very little about RDF or how it works, so I
don't know how much of a problem automated translation like this would be.

Your post also brings up another interesting point - the metadata will have
to be almost or totally complete to be useful.  There's little point in
doing searches on "Author" if only 20% of the authors in the database are
tagged as such.  How we can quickly go through a half-million articles
quickly and tag them is beyond me.

Regards,
- Craig Franklin


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