[Wikipedia-l] Showing causation among articles

Tue Jul 13 08:49:22 UTC 2004

IMHO such automated meta-data would be a fun project, but not within 
wikipedia. These things could be done via an SQL dump or the XML interface.

The results could be displayed online in a separate project and link to 
the wikipedia article(s). If it proves useful, wikipedia could then link 
to that project. "hyperWikipedi", anyone? :-)

Magnus

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?
>
>Abe
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