[Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

[Ray Saintonge]

Craig Franklin wrote:

>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 ;-)
>
Yes.  Our search system was written when the 'pedia was much smaller 
(less than 10% of its present size).  I suppose that our developpers 
must be aware of the needs of our more sophisticated information pile.  
They just need a bit of free time to do it.  :-)

> 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.
>
[[Category:  ]] should be quite adequate for these.  Introducing an 
open-ended system of name-spaces gives that many more opportunities for 
things to go wrong.  [[Category:d1945]] would be better than [[Died:1945]]

>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.
>
Everything takes time.  Since categories were introduced some 
contributors have shown great enthusiasm for the simple task of adding 
categories.  It's a fast and easy way to build up one's article count.  
If your idea were implemented this would only be a temporary problem.

Ec