[Wikipedia-l] Re: Showing causation among articles

Tue Jul 13 00:13:41 UTC 2004

Abe wrote:

> For example, all articles could have a tab called "influences".  In the
> case of the article on Copernicus, users would be free to list hyperlinks
> to other articles that complete the sentence
> 
>    "Copernicus influenced_____."
> 
> and articles that complete the sentence
> 
>      "______influenced Copernicus".
> 
> [...] Any thoughts?

It's an original idea, but I'm afraid I don't really see the major 
usefulness in it. It sounds like little more than a funny toy, and for 
that I doubt it's worth the implementation effort.

How do you define "influenced" anyway? Just about everyone and 
everything has in some way influenced some broad subject, say [[Art]] or 
[[Mathematics]], and Art and Mathematics in turn have in some way 
influenced just about everything...

Timwi