Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Keywords

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject Wikidemia, a project to improve Wikipedia's articles related to Wikidemia. For guidelines see the project page and Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ.
This article is part of WikiProject Community, a project to improve Wikipedia's articles related to Community. For guidelines see the project page and Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ.
Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 3 August 2005. The result of the discussion was no consensus.

Hi. Thanks for popping in. I know this all seems a bit abstract. I'm confused a bit as well. What I'm trying to do is develop a framework for sorting, listing and manipulating data at the word level. I'm a budding Perl coder with a keen interest in the Perl Object Environment. The KEYWORDS project is, I'm hoping, going to be an array or list of objects that represents a set of topics that are reused in many contexts:

  • encyclopedic (global encyclopedia context)
  • lexical (glopal dictionary context)
  • social (community interest context)
  • topical (personal interest context)

That still probably makes no sense at all, eh?

Contents

[edit] Example

Say you have a word - bird, for example. Since we are in Wikipedia, that link will be blue and clicking it will take you to a very nice general article about birds, complete with pretty pictures, a taxonomic frame showing where birds are in the animal kingdom and a whole set of encyclopedic facts about birds. There is also a link at the top to a disambiguation article for alternate meanings of "bird". Now, if we say wikt:bird we'll go to the English Wiktionary's article about bird. There we get its Etymology, Pronunciation, meanings as a Noun, Synonyms, Derivatives, Translations, etc. We also get a nice list of some varieties of bird. Plus there's a plug for Wikipedia that brings us back to the bird article here.

Now, what if I wanted to know if there was an entry for bird on the French or Serbian Wikipedias or in the German Wiktionary? I'd be in big trouble, because I niether speek nor read any of those. another problem is that bird is an English word so none of these will point me to an existing article:

I would have to translate the word into each of the three languages to find the bird article.

So, I go to wikt:bird#Translations and I manually translate:

I get results on the French and German sites, but my browser can't even supply the serbian characters. So here I've exposed my own limits and my equipment's limits. What I want to do with the KEYWORDS project is exhaustively expose limitations and try to solve at least a few of the problems with planet-wide information sharing in the Wikimedia World.

Does this help explain the purpose and scope of this project? Quinobi 06:36, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] What is this project doing, exactly?

I'm rather unclear on what the work product of what this WikiProject is intended to be. Will there simply be a large table on this page, or will articles actually in the Wikipedia be modified?

With regard to the translation problem above, the Wikipedia article should contain interwiki links to non-English Wikipedias, as well as Wiktionary, so I'm not sure what the need is that's being filled here. Unless the point is simply to add interwiki links to Wikipedia articles? The text on the project page makes no sense whatsoever; it appears to be a personal scratchpad of random references. WikiProject homepages are supposed to clearly explain what the project is for and what it is doing, for the benefit of people who might want to join. It's also a collaboration point, but collaboration pages aren't useful unless they make sense. -- Beland 01:48, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

I should add that I've read the m:LiquidThreads page, and it seems like a great idea, but I don't see how it's related to this WikiProject. -- Beland 01:51, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
I'm trying to clarify the purpose of the Keywords project myself. I thought the project page was fairly clear, but evidently it is not. For this I apologize and will try to fix it. The basic idea, which is mostly intuitive for me at this point is to develop topical frames or tables that help with sorting and linking topics to projects from the user's homepage. This way a user will have a quick reference to his or her interests via some keywords that link to shared tables belonging to WikiProjects that get assembled from data in Template:WikiProject. Other utilities like scripts and bots could use these tables as well.

In addition, Wikipedia:WikiProject groups within Wikipedia and Wikimedia sister projects - Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and the commons will have fields in the tables. Furthermore, Wikicities that are topically relevant will have fields and even non-wiki groups that provide sources that relate topically will also have fields. Maybe this is a stupid idea or I just a dumb way of explaining it. I appreciated your candid critisism as it help to expose flaws in my reasoning. Please give more! Thanks, Beland. Quinobi 20:02, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

OK...

I've tried to clean up the project space a little bit, but I still have some questions before I go and rewrite the project's decription. Regarding your "bird" example above, I think we're clear now on the following:

  • Bird, the English Wikipedia article, already has links to entries in other-language Wikipedias. See the "in other languages" section of the leftmost column.
  • The Wikipedia article has a link to the Wiktionary article; see the right-hand side under "External links".
  • The Wiktionary article also has links to "bird" in other languages.
  • The bird Wikipedia article has links to the various levels of scientific classification. Systematic construction of a database of that information is taking place on species.wikipedia.org, as well, and the projects will eventually be linked up.
  • Links to content on Wikibooks and Wikicommons (including pictures and sounds), spoken-word audio versions of articles, and the public Internet are being added over time. This can happen in a systematic fashion for a particular topic if someone is interested, or as part of a topic-specific WikiProject, which this is not.

So, this project doesn't really have to do anything to accomplish those things, since they are being or should be handled by other projects.

If a Wikipedia user is interested in birds, they can add a link to this article, or to Category:Birds. If there are WikiProjects or WikiPortals about bird or related things, they may choose to link to those as well, but maybe not. WikiProjects are supposed to get backlinks from talk pages of related articles. They generally point to categories to identify articles of interest. A new thing seems to be to put a Wikiportal which includes pointers to Wikiprojects (and also lots of other things) in the main category. See, for example, Category:Geography.

Now, WikiPortals and WikiProjects should (say the various advice pages) only be created and kept around if there's a community of people actively maintaining or participating in them. So if there's no WikProject and no WikiPortal specifically about birds, I might create one if there's enough interest. But maybe there's not, in which case, there's nothing to be gained by creating something which will only fall apart and shortly thereafter be deleted or marked as inactive or something.

Certainly WikiPortals and WikiProjects should reference one another when they cover the same topic. And there's plenty of opportunity to add links to external projects as well, whether those be Wikicites or random web sites.

Given how users can link to internal and external projects, portals, and categories, and how various content pieces can be interlinked, and given that all these links are more or less already machine-readable, I'm not sure what it is that this project needs to do. If you were envisioning some sort of shared links table, could you give a concrete example of something I might want to put on my user page? Or were you thinking of some sort of upgrade to the MediaWiki software to do new database-like things? Proposals for software changes are appropriate subjects for Meta, but not Wikiprojects here on Wikipedia.

The navigation between various Wikipedia coordination pages and projects and whatnot could certainly be improved. I've been working on that quite a bit recently, but we already have Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia Namespace as a coordination point (neglected though it may be, because few people are working on the problem). -- Beland 09:54, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your help, Beland. You made me feel so bad I changed my username and nearly abandoned this project. :( -- CQ 21:13, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Weird content

So, I'm also trying to make sense of what's on the project page now and what it has to do with the above conversation. Could you explain why the stuff under "Examples?" and "Abstraction" is there and what it all means? (I added these labels mostly as a guess, but they seem to make more sense than the obviously inappropriate labels they used to be under.) -- Beland 10:09, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

Dude! I'm a musician and an artist!   I'm not supposed to make sense. My specialty is to create memes, graffitti and loud music. I sometimes put on a labcoat and try to act like a scientist. You see, I'm trying to make these little Hyper-tables that'll bounce you all over the Internet while helping you maintain your train of thought. Wikipedia is like the referential anchor for all of that. If Wikipedia is going to be THE free encyclopedia, it needs to have some tentacles. I'm thinking metabolic organic functionality. Am I that much smarter than you? I think not! Thanks for the excellent work your doing. I'm recipricating by spamming a few of Ancheta's discussions and other places with your Atomic data paralyzer.

Thank you for the artwork there, but the purpose of the Wikipedia: namespace is to help build a better encyclopedia. If you have an idea for some new kind of links that Wikipedia doesn't already have, could you please explain in more detail, preferably with a concrete example? Otherwise, there's no sense cluttering up the project with nonsense. -- Beland 07:51, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

I suppose I should simply move this idea to meta and Wikibooks along with other nonsense I've been working on. Please see Wikipedia:WikiProject_Community/Strategy. I thought that would be a reasonable and clear explaination for what I am trying to do. If it seems altogether nonsense to you, I shall begin removing all of my contributions from the Wikipedia namespace altogether. I certainly did not intend to cause so many problems. Seriously, I apologize for being too presumptuous. I honestly don't know how to be more clear. Quinobi 21:57, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
Well, I read that page. It seems to be proposing improvements to navigation around the Wikipedia: namespace, but when it comes down to specifics, all I see are tables linking WikiProjects and Wikiportals with a lot of broken links, and a newspaper column that never happened. I already cross-linked all those pages to one another, and cross-referenced them on Wikipedia:Wikiportal, which has a much more comprehensive list. The "personal context tractor" table seems to describe things that people put on their user pages, but in a more diverse array of styles. We already have plenty of group "todo" lists, using template-tags and categories. Navigation around the Wikipedia: namespace is currently being cleaned up by removing cruft and categorizing and cross-referencing. Sometimes people also add navigational templates, but I don't see any useful ones coming out of this page. I do see a lot of academic pseudobabble and grandiose statements that don't seem to actually say much of anything. Wikipedia:WikiProject Community lists many goals, but it doesn't seem to actually be doing anything to reach them - or even proposing anything that could be done to reach them. Normally, WikiProjects list articles and categories to be improved, but this one just seems to link to some ones that happen to have something to do with "community". One of the goals is "To develop a uniform reference for curriculum in the Humanities" - but this is an encyclopedia. Curriculum development is happening on Wikibook's Wikiversity. In short, I don't see anything useful here; just a lot of clutter. -- Beland 02:38, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Well, I think you're pretty wierd, too Beland ;) -- CQ 21:13, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ambiguity and redundancy

Here's an example of a complex problem: Šumadija_District and Sumadija seem to be about the same place. I have no idea about the region, but both have some nice content and should probably be merged. But who in m:The Wikipedia Community should do the job? I have no context to work from, compared to what I would need to do the necessary work.

If say an American happened to wind up in a town within that district (or state, whatever it is) and noticed a link to each article somewhere in that town's article. That reader would wonder why there exists two separate links to two separate articles? Is this a distinction similar to Saint Louis, Missouri (the city) which is inside of Saint Louis County, Missouri? How would that English speaker find say, Serbian Wikipedians to help with the tasks? That's the easy part. (look for User pages that link link to those articles for starters.)

If a table existed that showed Šumadija and Åumadija are the same place, and Sumadija a US-English friendly version of the same word, it might be helpful. These and other synonymous keywords could be filed together in some way that clearly links, disambiguates, merges, splits or whatever depending on some kind of contextual framework. Having thousands of people in hundereds of countries speaking dozens of languages write tens of thousands of articles is approaching either a breakdown or a solution. -- CQ 20:52, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

I have added the {{mergewith}} tag to both of these articles to indicate that they should be merged with each other. Serbian Wikipedians are easily found in Category:Wikipedians in Serbia and Montenegro. In the United States, the Geographic Names Information System is exactly the sort of table you describe. I doubt there's one for the former Yugoslavia. The m:Wikidata project is probably the best bet for creating one in a distributed fashion. However, an interim solution is to use redirects and interwiki links to indicate that X is a synonym to Y, either in English or in a different language. And also to mention the synonyms in the intro to the article, which we should be doing anyway. This will pretty much solve the problem for humans (except for some cases where you can't read foreign-language articles, but that's a general problem, and that's what translators are for), but less so for machines. -- Beland 18:57, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 13:54, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../w/i/k/Wikipedia_talk%7EWikiProject_Keywords_d850.html"