On Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 10:30:50AM -0700, lcrocker(a)nupedia.com wrote:
Please put the language links in a separate
table, otherwise you are
violating the first normal form of database design theory. Any
introductory text on database design will tell you why that is bad.
The Wikipedia database layout is already pretty far from
normalized (mainly because MySQL is too slow on joins), but if
I did add this feature I would make it a proper one-to-one
mapping table.
Ok. It's just that denormalization is a bad idea in this case because if
you have a "two-way access pattern" here, i.e., you are going to look up the
Bs for a certain A and the As for a certain B. Nesting the Bs with an A or the
As with a B is then almost always a bad idea.
I'm not yet convinced that it would be worth the
effort, though. I'm more
inclined to think that the international wikis should be more independent
and encapsulated.
Why? Until now this approach has resulted in the non-English Wikipedias
feeling highly neglected. I still wonder what Jimbo's opinion on this is.
I like the idea
of links for categories ('biography', 'country',
'mathematical theorem', 'book', 'movie', ...) by the way.
We discussed tings like that early on, and initially rejcted it
as an attempt to categorize articles in a non-wiki way; we wanted
different organization schemes to evolve out of normal wiki
editing and linking, rather than imposing order from the outside.
It should of course be as non-constraining, open and as editable as
possible. All I'm thinking of here is an extra edit field called "category"
that will result in a link to "category:book" if you typed in "book".
On
that page we could then put tips, tricks, hints, policies et cetera on book
descriptions. If the category doesn't exist you get a ... big surprise ...
edit link.
But it might be time to revisit the idea, because at
2,500 edits
a day and growing, it's just no longer possible for one person to
keep track of edits to articles he's interested in,
That reminds me. Whatever happend to the code for grouping edits on the
recent changes page? I remember you made a test site and then ... nothing?
and subject is the only filter that really makes sense
for reducing that
data to a manageable level. I'd still like to see if we couldn't build
those subjects automatically in some way based on links in the database.
Ah, you mean a real subject hierarchy, like in ... er ... that other big
encyclopedia, so you could simply watch a subject area? I don't see how that
can be derived. Having an editable list if "subject areas" for articles
would be great. It could give us a nice subject tree that you could navigate
through. Actually I never liked having both a description of mathematics and
a list of subjects in the same article.
-- Jan Hidders