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wiki:page_class_vocabulary

A suggested requirement for a living knowledge commons wiki

There are a small number of page classes / types

Even Wikipedia has clearly but informally established page types, among which disambiguation is an obvious one. Decide carefully on a minimal set of page types, and stick with those.

Why is this desirable?

Helps comprehension, provided all the types are patently obvious in meaning.

How it could work, and issues

Here is a possible initial list of what a page could be ‘about’. It might be worth having a look at schema.org to see if that gives useful clues.

  • Page giving information about a particular thing or happening. The title of this page would typically either be a proper noun (with capitals) as the name of the thing, or start with the definite article ‘the’.
    • identified person
    • particular identified organisation
    • ‘work’ (as in ‘work of art’ or ‘creative work’)
    • other particular thing
    • particular event, occurrence, happening, etc.
  • Concept / pattern / class / type
    • this could cover ‘category’ or ‘tag’ pages
    • includes all kinds of nouns like ‘dog’, ‘table’, ‘cloud’, but referring to the class/species rather than any particular instance of that class
  • Theory
  • Assertion, including evidence for a theory, or that a pattern applies to a thing
  • all other pages are unclassified expressions – including opinion, poetry, preference

This needs thinking through in conjunction with semantic links. It works in with my top ontology, so I have some agenda here. If there is some alternate way of classifying different types of page, I’d be happy to talk over how there might be possible integration. The above list is intended to be an initial proposal, not cast in concrete.

Evaluation, or existing implementations

I know of no good set of page types applicable to knowledge commons.

Various wikis have a principle of small units wherever possible. For example, TiddlyWiki has the concept of Tiddlers, and the way Fedwiki is structured explicitly encourages pages as small units rather than complex entities.

wiki/page_class_vocabulary.txt · Last modified: by Simon Grant