Talk:Simple ideology of Wikitax

I moved the follwing discussion from Talk:Wikipedia DTD to this page. Perhaps the not-logged-in-guy from canada could arrange the ideas on Simple ideology of Wikitax, Wikipedia4, Spacetime DTD, Wikipedia board manual etc. in one place? --Nichtich 01:34 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

See Wikipedia4 timeline which tries to anticipate and order those issues.

---

A great proportion of the content of the Wikipedia is names, places, dates/times, and titles (e.g. King, physicist, Elvis impersonator). It would be truly ideal if the XML DTD let us deal with all these in a standard way. For instance 1999 refers to the calendar year 1999 in the Gregorian Calendar, but there's no reason not to allow exact dates to be converted to other calendars. Adopting a default representation of UTC Time Intervals (from absolute time A to absolute time B, or absolute time A plus time interval C=1 day, 1 month, etc.) and shorthand for referring to those, e.g. "January 2003" refers to UTC January 1, 2003 (absolute) plus 1 month, isn't that hard to do.

Without accurate time semantics, everything else falls apart in a hurry. The second most important thing to get right is locations and place-names. As borders shift over time, what is in 'Czechoslovakia' or the 'Austro-Hungarian Empire' in one article is in 'Slovakia' now... this is another major headache. Eventually we'll have nice latitude-longitude maps of the actual borders at key points in time, and towns and villages will be located by some automatic means.

Names are already discussed extensively elsewhere, it's probably the best laid out convention there is in wikipedia, appropriate as it's very very important. No point fixing anything here though until articles can be titled with Capitals (for proper names) and without (lowercase). This is needed for wiktionary quite desperately.

As to links, it would be valuable to specify link types, like the HTML "REL=" and "REV=" attributes. RELationships important for wikipedia would be things like: link to source, link to contrary view or contradiction, link to sub-article, link to including category, link to personality critical to concept in the article, link to personality peripheral to concept in the article, external reference. Doing this with link types as opposed to with human-readable conventions would make radical indexing possible. For instance, as a blue-sky possibility, one could mark articles on Islam with links to reflect Shia vs. Sunni views, so that one could get an all-Shia or all-Sunni index of how the concepts were organized. The United Nations University wanted stuff like this ten years ago, but there was just no tool to do it.

You're talking about a w:Thesaurus or a w:Semantic Web - very interesting indeed! But too complex for Wikipedia.

In it's full form, yes. But some things, like name and place names and times, are all being standardized now, as part of the current syntax...

By the way this is not the right place to discuss on syntax enhancements (see Wikitax). Wikipedia DTD is just meant to be an XML representation of the current Syntax.

...and therefore those things already standardized must be represented in the XML ultimately. Representations of words in other languages, dates, and such things we use wikitext conventions for now, should be possible to express in XML tag form, so that they are exact, and so that automated conversion of other text can use the XML tag representation, which is unambiguous, as an intermediary.

Sorry for my blindness but i don't know any standarized wiki syntax for names, times, and places (I only know the syntax for "this entry in another language's wiki") Could you please summarize?

Right now it's a hack - we standardize the names, times, and places on a semantic level as sequences of characters, but so strictly defined that they might as well be tags, and should have at least the option of being tags. It is just better to translate things from other texts into tags, than into other texts. Things like 2000 and 1990s and Palestine, Texas have some semantics humans are supposed to understand, but why not have an unambiguous low-level representation which is a time span in UTC from Jan 1. 2000 on the stroke of midnight to Dec. 31 2000 again at the stroke of the new year, etc., and if it matters that it was 2000 EST then just add the time zone there. Then the place issue, which you ask about next:

For instance if you have the lat/long of a given place in the world, it's a lot better to have an XML tag for that and a preferred name presented to the user. But then if someone wants to know 'what happened here' it's the lat/long not the place name (which changes, and is different in each language) that's referenced.

Places are moving (for instance the magnetic poles). What are "preferred names"? How want's to know 'what happened here'? I don't see the point.

Not everyone sits on their ass all day complaining about things they don't understand - many computers are mobile and getting more mobile all the time - some even use PDAs and wearables close to 24x7. Besides that there are lots of places in the world that have public computers. A friend of mine sent mail from an Ulan Bator, Mongolia internet cafe once. He might have liked to know what was nearby geographically and culturally, and what history happened there, if only so he could ask people about things in person. Any traveller knows why an index by geography is needed.

Thanks, now I do understand. I also like traveling but i prefer books for this purpose ;-)

If you have the time and the lat/long, you can correct for pole drift. GPS systems already compensate for this. So perhaps spacetime_DTD just needs its own DTD, and Wikipedia can use that.

Also see the article on a simple ideology of Wikitax regarding 'sources'.

As i said - this is very interesting (I am working on semantic webs, too) but just too complicated for the Wikipedia-encyclopedia which is meant for people not for Artifical Intelligence.

We do lots of indexing now. And no, the theory of semantic webs is flawed if it is telling you that the purpose of them is just to enable AI applications. Think also that AI is involved in things like geographic databases all the time: generating street directions from lat/longs, for instance.

Natural Language is much shorter and more powerful.

And more ambiguous. When ambiguity can be removed and yield powerful facilities like a geographic index, it should. Natural language fails for representations of spacetime, period.

There are also parenthesis and footnotes for comments on sources. I'd like a <name>Smith</name> tag, too but nobody will use it. How about "Smith (name)", "New York (city)", "1999 (year)"?

There's nothing terribly wrong with the semantic schemes we are using, and those suggestions are good, but if you're going to rigorize titles, why not also provide an underlying tag schema? As to Proper Names the solution is to properly support capitalization conventions - if only for sake of wiktionary.

---

I will not follow this interesting discussion for now because I stronly doubt that the average wikipedia-author will use semantic tagging (I often see people using lines of bold text when they mean starting a section). Since I also do not beliefe in Artifical Intellegence that is possible to convert ambigous "conventions" into the right tags I better go on with the Wikipedia DTD to create a Paper Wikipedia.

Fair enough. Paper is certainly the most important medium for publication. And so the Simple Ideology should actually be updated to mention that Paper Wikipedia is an even more universal convention than anything on the web...

BTW: Why not using w:N3 ;-)

I'll check it out.

Paper wikipedia is the highest priority ?

what ???????

since when ?? the idea is never to print it out or put it on paper !! only read the first line of this and by default the rest MUST be rubbish. consider putting such a statement later on the page to ease readers into it. Machete97 22:30, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

I have no idea

The first line of the current page refers the reader to "I have no idea" - a "red" link, which is supposedly "more representative of current developer team opinion". Should this perhaps be fixed or removed? 2A02:8109:9340:136C:A919:613D:DF18:44C 14:16, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Actuality

Is this page still actual, or is it only kept for historical interest? 2A02:8109:9340:136C:A919:613D:DF18:44C 14:17, 4 June 2014 (UTC)