Comments on: Wikipedia URLs as blog subject codes

By: Chaos Magnet

Chaos Magnet — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 21:47:22 +0000

Wikipedia URLs as blog subject codes
Dave Megginson (yes, the SAX Dave Megginson) has arrived on the personal blog scene, and he’s got an interesting suggestion: that Wikipedia URLs could be used as blog subject codes. Wikipedia is, as the name implies, an encyclopedia in the…

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 12:49:03 +0000

I can see why using wikipedia urls is attractive, but I think the real way forward is to allow categorisation in hierarchies, rather than the flat (and very impermanent) wikipedia namespace. I have a longer discussion of the issue in the context of scientific data management in my blog.

By: len

len — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 15:34:17 +0000

In a proposal for the DHS UICDS that didn’t make it, we proposed using wikipedia and wikipedia-analogs to enable public safety agencies to begin creating subject matter expertise online and in community. That is a heckuva lot simpler approach to the problem of aggregating expertise bottom-up than waiting for subject code and authorized ontologies to come out of the Beltway. People wait for funding, or wait for decisions, or wait for Jesus to come back when all they have to do is form a community, open an online editor, and just start adding content and services.

The web as a ‘world of ends’ really escapes too many industries looking for a way to create a product niche when what they really should be doing is creating a content niche and offering a service. It’s just too simple to get the vendor’s attention, so it is usually a customer who gets it done.

Good to see your blog, David. As always, I found my way here via Tim Bray.

By: Danny

Danny — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 09:01:07 +0000

Nice to see you blogging, David! The problem for me with using Wikipedia URIs is the tie to a single topic scheme (albeit a good one). Ideally it would be better to enable the use of any, possibly in combination. The most promising work I've seen on this recently is the FOAF Output plugin, which (in part) auto-generates a personal ontology based on WordPress categories, expressed using SKOS, and inserts statements in the RSS feed for each item referring to the terms in the ontology. This is really more of a formalisation of the del.icio.us/Flickr/Technorati kind of informal tagging system, associating the words with the user's own scheme. But this approach would be entirely compatible with the kind of referencing you describe, and the user could potentially make cross-references with other schemes such as Wikipedia and WordNet. Ok, so your suggestion would avoid the need for any RDF, and would I'm sure make a good quick-n-dirty approach. But it would be nice to use it in a way that would leave the door open for any RDF-capable clients/services to go further.

By: James Tauber

James Tauber — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 07:38:22 +0000

Couldn't agree more. See Wikipedia URIs which is a follow up (inspired by your post) to an earlier post Wikipedia as a URI Lookup Service.

By: Quoderat » Hub URLs and feudalism in the blogsphere

Quoderat » Hub URLs and feudalism in the blogsphere — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

[...] a Technorati tag or the Microsoft web site. Wikipedia-boro I have already suggested that Wikipedia would be a good source of subject codes, a [...]