Carcharoth wrote: > I think what some people want is more a way to take a category such as > "Famous animals" and its subcategories, and run a dynamic query that > returns a list of all the members of those categories sorted by dates > of birth and death. A dynamic version of a list. I know I'd love it if > that could be done for all biographical articles, so there was some > super-list (and very big one at that), which could be sorted by name, > dates of birth and death, and other biographical data. > > That would be more a biographical database than a list, but the > potential is there for Wikipedia to be a massive biographical > database, but extracting clean data is difficult sometimes, because of > how the system is currently set up.
Absolutely true, but delete the word "biographical". The potential is there for Wikipedia to be a massive database, period. And I don't think it would be too hard. Just extract all the key/value pairs that are currently residing in infobox template invocations, and dump them into a nice, flexible, free-form database. Then arrange to invoke the infobox templates out of that database. Then provide a simple key/value editor on the edit page, to edit this metadata. Then provide a user-friendly query wizard. Hey presto, the complaints about editability of infobox template invocations go way down, *and* we've got cool new search functionality, and a whole bunch of strange and tedious-to-maintain categories can go away, and we don't need to worry about category intersection any more, and... _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l