[Wikipedia-l] Re: Simple XML ideas

Wed Feb 13 02:53:22 UTC 2002

Jan Hidders wrote:

>Why not [[George Washington (person)]]. I thought that was the whole
>point of having namespaces. That reminds of something else I wanted to
>ask. Why do we now have two namespace concepts? (We have "X:Y" and we
>have "Y (X)".) I would vote for one namespace concept with one
>notation: X (Y).

I think the two are different: the software enforced name spaces are
there to separate the encyclopedia proper from all the cruft
surrounding it. Your parenthesis notation serves mainly to distinguish
several concepts with the same name: [[Cardinal (bird)]], [[Cardinal
(person)]]. I don't think people want to or should be required to
universally slap on "(person)" to every title that describes a person.

Jimbo's "tagging" idea is different still. I agree with Magnus: if
such a tagging is to take place, it would have to happen on the
article level, maybe easiest as a little choice list when you edit and
submit an article (Place, Idea, Person, etc.) That wouldn't complicate
matters for contributors (they could always ignore the choice list and
leave it at the default). I don't immediately see the payoff though.

Axel