I love progress.
List of my unique contributions to wikipedia (takes a little time): http://home.sus.mcgill.ca/~hperes/cgi-bin/uniwiki/uniwiki.cgi
Improving wiki
First a random topic:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engrish which talks about the english spoken by the chinese.
Semantically, engrish is really a sub idea of a more general idea, namely, accents. Lets define engrish to be the semantic child of ONE! of it's MANY POSSIBLE semantic parents: accents.
So u goto to the "What links here" from Engrish, and you'll indeed see that no page on accents links to it. you'll see that there is in fact no page on accents. To address this: I propose, that every page should have a semantic parent or parents. Specifically, when editing a page, you should also have the ability to denote whether some [[link to topic]] is a sub-category (or semantic child) of that page.
EG:
Educational Reform in occupied japan. "educational reform" the idea, only applies in this case to occupied japan. Its much easier to develop some notation to help you show this, instead of taken many steps to manually create this structure.
EG:
you're in a page on occupied japan, and u decide to create a new wiki page on educational reform, so use a new notation to show that the link is a sub-category of the current "page"/idea : [[>>:educational reform]] the ">>:" denotes that the wiki-link is a child of the page containing it.
Now, if you just searched for "educational reform" it will appear as:
WWII >> Occupied Japan >> Educational reform
Look at the source though, for THIS page, and u will see how its really accomplished. VERY ugly (verbose), very inneficient (can cause data to be lost and miscatagorized more easily):
[[WWII]] >> [[Occupied_Japan_Post_WWII| Occupied Japan]] >> [[Educational_reform_in_occupied_japan_post_wwII|Educational reform]]
Also, I think that every page should list it's parent(s) at the top. And that every page should list all the children that no-one has linked to at the bottom.
You'll probably want some sense of the "atomic parent" (something,according to this scheme, has no semantic parent), and this can be the set of carefully controlled main topics u have.
This approach is far closer to how human's think, and will result in a far more useful wikipedia, in my opinion.
Below is conversation about this:
- Pardon me for saying so, but this is a horrible horrible idea. Categories of knowledge are not rigid and they are most emphatically not on a strict one parent -> many children relationship. Most of these children have multiple parents -- for instance your example can be rooted equally well in Japan and in Education, perhaps even in Reform... If you want to make rigidly hierarchical index pages, go for it, but don't pretend you can enforce it on the naming system without causing more pain. It most certainly is not "closer to how humans think", it's much farther away from it than an amorphous web of point-to-point connections. --Brion 10:45 Sep 23, 2002 (UTC)
- Actually, A more careful reading of my page will show you that I indeed account for multiple parents per child. -hfastedge
- Then you're creating a double nightmare -- multiple rigid hierarchical index schemes, all of which have mickel powers. What exactly are you gaining? --Brion 11:21 Sep 23, 2002 (UTC)
You gain the ability to have much less verbose links, so an improvement to the naming system. The structure of ideas that this exposes more explicitely is invaluable.
Battle of Hundred Regiments is a link that has way too much grammar in it. What happens if u want to write about the deaths at the battle? so u create a new link: deaths at Battle of Hundred Regiments this is practically a sentance. And when u search for it, u'll simply get that page. Instead of something like:
[[WWII]] >> [[Battles]] >> [[Hundred Regiments]] >> [[Deaths]]
[[War Battles]] >> [[By location]] >> [[Asia]] >> [[Hundred Regiments]]
You see how much information u can get with this type of structure?? Now, a some good work needs to be done to avoid clutter...but thats what I think should be worked on.-hfastedge
- When I look up "deaths at battle of hundred regiments" I would indeed expect to get exactly that. Maybe that's just me, though? --Brion
- You do get exactly that, and far MORE...-hfastedge
- And in exchange, much much more complicated linking syntax from outside the cozy land of parent and child. Unless you're not recommending the elimination of the horribly long complex names that you seem to be railing against in favor of much longer and more complex hierarchies? (And can you leave the page alone for 15 seconds? I can't save a comment without getting an edit conflict. ;) --Brion
- It wouldnt be anything more complex than a real http style href. A new step in the editing process would be introdruced to resolve those links that don't lie in the cozy domain of parent/child ideas
- New step in the editing process? No more complex than an http href?? Okay, this idea is officially bonkers. --Brion