Wikipedia: WikiProject Concepts/Recap2

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Okay, Larry, one more go. I think our views are actually converging, which looks to me like a good thing!

I agree completely! (Answers interspersed as before.) --LMS

You ask, "why not just add that structure to articles?"; I think it's a great idea. It may pose some problems, though, because some articles describe several meanings for the same word, which makes links ambiguous. There is clearly a need for keeping things that (unfortunately) share the same name as separate articles. Has anyone around here given some thought to that? Perhaps the use of suffixes could suffice to disambiguate names?

That's something that will be handled handily with parentheses as soon as (if ever...) we switch to Magnus Manske's PHP wiki software. This is an old problem, as you might have guessed. We've been handling it on a case-by-case basis; see naming conventions and naming conventions/Disambiguating.

You ask, "does WikiProject Concepts concern only what you call "theory"?". The project is chiefly concerned with theory. However, to the extent that we use theory to explain or describe reality, and to the extent that we use real-world examples to invent theory, there exist relationships between the pure world of theory and the messy, uncertain real world. Those relationships have a place in the project as well. This place is outlined because that's where controversy can arise. A theoretical construct provides one potentially useful view of a real entity. Of course nothing prevents several competing theoretical constructs from referring to a particular entity (actually having multiple viewpoints is almost always beneficial). See for instance the entry on alphabets, which refers to real-world entities that (may) fit the model.

You state, "In fact, although our mathematics section is one of the best so far (because some actual mathematicians have been at work on it!), one aspect of it that I've deplored has been the fact that concepts are often not introduced as simply and clearly as they should be." Well, then, let me at it. Perhaps I can help.

To conclude, I believe that we agree that the idea of plain, simple, explicit structure is beneficial to navigation around Wikipedia articles. I believe that we also agree that such structure can (and should!) be integrated into the articles themselves. In such a case, there is no need to develop this elsewhere (but I thank you for the pointers!).

The last question mark I see regarding this issue concerns the concrete form that structural information should assume. Is it beneficial to keep the structure as lightweight as possible (i.e. no sentences)? Is it beneficial to append the structure to the article, or should it be enmeshed in it? I believe you already know what my current view is about that. I'm just wondering what you (and everyone) think(s). --Seb

And you might or might not have guessed my view. This is, first and foremost, an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias consist mainly of prose sentences, with crossreferences that in the case of hypertext might (in some cases) sensibly appear in list form.

I suspect we don't need a specific WikiProject to tell people how to provide information on the conceptual structure of articles. Wikipedia is also a completely open project that has thrived because people have felt free to contribute their knowledge in whatever format they felt comfortable; if others feel a another format is better, they can render it in that format. But making participants feel comfortable contributing their knowledge is of overriding importance.

Even if we did want to adopt some rules & regs about how to provide information on the conceptual interrelations of articles, we would first need a lot of experience actually trying out different ways of tying articles together, so that we have a well-developed understanding of what is best. I think probably the best way to get that experience is simply to write clear, accessible definitions or descriptions of topics, add lots of links to other articles, and add some sort of navigational links to the bottoms of articles. This is something we've done in many cases, but (of course) very inconsistently and with mixed results. So, there's a lot of work to be done!