[Foundation-l] Project Proposal: Wikicat

Fri Jul 28 22:06:03 UTC 2006

Erik-

I'll discuss technical integration details with you
and Gerard offline.  However, in a more general vein,
I'm not sure the lexical construct WiktionaryZ wishes
to impose on every sort of Wikidata entity makes
sense.  For example, multi-lingualism is certainly
important in a lexicographic context, but it does not
apply to a catalog.  A catalog has language-specific
data, for sure, but this is not multi-lingual data-
the language(s) in which a book's title is
historically expressed by the author or publisher is
important, and you cannot just do your own translation
into an arbitrary language and say that is also the
book's title.  Similarly, films are given multiple
titles by their distributors for different markets yet
often these are very different from what a direct
translation would look like.  Here is more detail on
these issues:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_Wikidata

This also does not touch the performance/scalability
issues of storing all text data, all numerica data,
etc. in one table.

Regarding different referencing styles, I'm open to
anything though I think you'll find that in practice
standard numbers like ISBN are less cumbersome to use
than titles.  For example, <<ref:The Davinci Code>>-
does this mean the book, the movie, the audio book, or
"The Davinci Code: Fact or Fiction?" ?

Also, citation is not just fetching bibliographic data
for the purposes of displaying it in an info box like
other information.  It is fundamentally about
associating an assertion with evidence or support, and
so must capture the cited "text" as well as the
paraphrase text. Here is a mock-up of these idea in
the context of an enhanced article validation feature:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikicite_spider_review_mockup.jpg

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