 | The following is a feature request for Wikipedia, the details of which may still be in development or under discussion. As a whole, this request should be discussed with the developers, who will decide whether or not to act on it. |
- "Inside every link is a tag waiting to get out" -- David Weinberger[1]
"Link intersection" is an informal tagging system meant to complement the more formal taxonomies that we have been creating using categories. Instead of adding tags to articles, we would use the wikilinks that already exist in every article. This is essentially a tagging system that is going unused. Every time we link an article to another, we in effect create a tag. All of these tags are managed in a pure wiki way. So all that is missing is the way to harvest information from these tags. A new "Find similar articles" tool would do this by finding all articles that contain the same set of user selected wikilinks. If the links to articles intersect, the articles themselves are very likely to be similar.
This proposal requires a change to the MediaWiki software. "Link intersection" offers the possibility of adding several new features that will benefit users by adding valuable research tools as well as improving the categorization system by taking over some of the functions it has been handling.
There are three components to this proposal:
- Improving the "What links here" tool.
- Creating a "Find similar articles" tool -- the user interface for finding link intersections.
- Related changes to the categorization system.