User:Hfastedge

I love progress.

List of my unique contributions to wikipedia (takes a little time): http://home.sus.mcgill.ca/~hperes/cgi-bin/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 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.

Next, there also needs to be a way to resolve links better... since wiki is all about the people...let them do it.

Im sure that many people will fail to link to my current occupied japan page,because its so verbose. but allowing them to actively resolve links will keep things more tightly wound

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)