[Wikipedia-l] Showing causation among articles

Tue Jul 13 07:01:09 UTC 2004

How can you tell who was influencing whom?  Most of the time these 
influences are tenuous and speculative.  Perhaps the greatest influence 
on someone's life was his kindergarten teache, but no-one can know for 
sure.  If someone worked with another for some time it's easy to 
conclude that the older had influence on another.  I noted somewhere 
that there was a famous black widow murderess in the 1930s Balkans.  She 
had managed to stow 40 bodies in her cellar.  It would be pure 
speculation to suggest that this influenced Kesslring when he wrote his 
play, "Arsenic and Old Lace."  The chronology seems right, but it's 
still speculation.

Ec

Abe wrote:

>Wikipedia has proven itself as an effective process for creating
>encyclopedia articles.  But, there's an easy way to give Wikipedia the
>ability to to show causal relations among articles.
>
>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".
>
>If users did this for many articles, then a network of causation would
>emerge, where the nodes of the network are articles and the links are
>"influences".  This network could be exploited through a search tool that
>finds paths of articles between article A and B.
>
>Such a tool would allow for a fascinating study of history.  For instance,
>Wikipedia currently has an article on the Cold War and an article on the
>Attacks on Sept. 11.  But, what if you want to see if there's a causal
>relationship between the two events?  Neither article mentions the other,
>and rightly so, since any causal relation between them is too indirect for
>the scope of an encyclopedia article.  Also, you won't find one article
>titled "How the Cold War Influenced 9/11" because encyclopedias typically
>provide information that fills the middle space of the spectrum between
>history books on one end, and the daily newspaper on the other.  This
>question would usually be a question for history, because normal methods
>of tackling such questions require: analysis and time.
>
>But the system I describe above can compress the analysis. Each
>influence-link between articles would be one tiny piece of
>analysis between events that happpened close together in time.  By drawing
>a path through these small links of analysis and time, you can connect
>events that happen farther apart in time, thereby automating the analysis.
>
>There are a lot of other uses of this kind of "influence
>mapping".  And, you could get a lot of fun data to play with, as
>well.  But, that's the main idea I wanted to throw out.  Any thoughts?
>  
>