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> MediaWiki is pretty much a blogging engine, article content and structure is restricted by the guidelines only, not by the engine. This is good, and at the ea

by sjy 6y ago

> MediaWiki is pretty much a blogging engine, article content and structure is restricted by the guidelines only, not by the engine. This is good, and at the early stages it was the only possible solution, since there is so much that can be useful in an encyclopedia article. I wonder whether there is a fundamental trade-off here. The track record of expert systems and structured knowledge bases is not great. Capturing data in these systems is relatively hard and expensive and therefore none of them have become as detailed as Wikipedia (cf. Wikidata). We also know that the task of giving structure to our own implicit knowledge by writing it down, even in a way that is not machine-accessible, is difficult and time-consuming. It may not be possible to create machine-accessible knowledge bases without “front-loading” the work of giving structure to that knowledge. Knowledge bases that require this to be done may never be as detailed and comprehensive as a less structured resource like Wikipedia, just as Wikipedia will never be as detailed and comprehensive as the (even less machine-readable) sum of all human knowledge distributed over the set of surviving brains and texts.

krick 6y ago
I believe that this is absolutely the case. In fact, this is kind of the point. No way we would have Wikipedia if it did demand much structure from the very beginning. I don't see it possible (and, in fact, I don't want it to happen) to enforce structure in articles that cover some abstract concept, idea or new phenomena. But for better or worse, Wikipedia is now also a huge database of biological species, anime characters and car models. It has several million of biographies, which cannot (nor probably should) be simplified for machine comprehension, but (not universally, of course, but highlighting that is a part of the point as well) have very concrete data entires, like DOB/DOD, "simplified characteristic" (actor, mathematician, politician, imperor of Rome), height/weight for many athletes and so on. And (even though this isn't the point), amazingly, all these countless articles already follow roughly the same structure. Like, for each biography you can expect to find the circumstances of death near the end of "Life" section, but before "Legacy", and you'll find "Interesting facts" in the very end. It may seem very natural (and it is!), but the reason I'm mentioning this, is that encyclopedia also is the tool that helps the authors to structurize data. I'm sure that 2nd and 3rd dinosaur articles were very different from each other in structure. But when you are writing a 1001th, it will be pretty similar to 1000th. Even if for you personally it's the first one to write. And it is the point that it's hard for people to consciously produce structured, machine readable data. But we want to have structured, machine readable data. That's why I think gradually modifying Wikipedia itself in a way to unobtrusively trick us to provide this data, is the way as opposed to wikidata. There is an example to get the feel of what I mean in the last paragraph of my response to bawolff, if you are curious.

by sjy 6y ago

krick 6y ago

I believe that this is absolutely the case. In fact, this is kind of the point. No way we would have Wikipedia if it did demand much structure from the very beginning. I don't see it possible (and, in fact, I don't want it to happen) to enforce structure in articles that cover some abstract concept, idea or new phenomena. But for better or worse, Wikipedia is now also a huge database of biological species, anime characters and car models. It has several million of biographies, which cannot (nor probably should) be simplified for machine comprehension, but (not universally, of course, but highlighting that is a part of the point as well) have very concrete data entires, like DOB/DOD, "simplified characteristic" (actor, mathematician, politician, imperor of Rome), height/weight for many athletes and so on. And (even though this isn't the point), amazingly, all these countless articles already follow roughly the same structure. Like, for each biography you can expect to find the circumstances of death near the end of "Life" section, but before "Legacy", and you'll find "Interesting facts" in the very end. It may seem very natural (and it is!), but the reason I'm mentioning this, is that encyclopedia also is the tool that helps the authors to structurize data. I'm sure that 2nd and 3rd dinosaur articles were very different from each other in structure. But when you are writing a 1001th, it will be pretty similar to 1000th. Even if for you personally it's the first one to write. And it is the point that it's hard for people to consciously produce structured, machine readable data. But we want to have structured, machine readable data. That's why I think gradually modifying Wikipedia itself in a way to unobtrusively trick us to provide this data, is the way as opposed to wikidata. There is an example to get the feel of what I mean in the last paragraph of my response to bawolff, if you are curious.