* Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se [Mon, 24 Jan 2011 07:06:02 +0100]:
On 01/22/2011 08:15 PM, Bryan Tong Minh wrote:
Having a clear separate input text field "Author: ____" is much more user friendly {{#fileauthor:}}, which is so to say, a type of
obscure
MediaWiki jargon.
I disagree. In real life, there are always more compliated cases, where an author is not an author, but two authors or a sculptor, or one painter and one photographer. These things never fit in a single "author" field, and the same goes for any other separated fields. But the free-form Wikipedia can handle all real-world cases in plain human language.
Various "expert systems" based on "artificial intelligence" existed since the 1980s, but none of them produced a universal encyclopedia. Only the text-based Wikipedia did. After this humiliating fact, the same AI people (now dressed as "semantic web" scholars) come and claim that they too could have built Wikipedia, if it only were more structured. They are wrong, of course. Lack of structure is precisely what built Wikipedia.
One may have not just a single triple for that, but the list / set of triples for the same person in a different role (different kind of author). There are two extremes - not to have any structure or to be overly structural. If there are few extra fields for an image description, why don't generalize it for all kinds of measured data - geographical, historical, population statistics, financial and economical data and so on? Why only the images are allowed to have structural and measurable data? However, I don't think that Wikipedia should have AI, because it requires huge computing power, and the problem is that AI algorithms are not efficient enough. To have the data structured is not a bad thing. It probably should not even try to do SPARQL, but offer these things to external sits. Don't make complex queries, leave it for offline tools / bots or toolserver. Semantic bots are a good idea - they might mine the data finding the cross-sets. It should be even lighter than SMW. However, I might be wrong. Dmitriy