Semantic MediaWiki/Problem statement
From Meta
In spite of the great success of Wikipedia and related projects, the restriction to pure text- or multimedia-based content creates narrow boundaries for using the gathered data. For example, many users would be interested in data such as
- a list of all philosophical notions that were introduced by Rawls,
- the collection of all Bulgarian tennis players that are younger than 20 years,
- a diagram that displays the average lifespan of persons in Wikipedia, for all decades in the previous thousand years,
- a gallery of all images of New York city that can be found in any Wikipedia, ordered by the time at which they were taken,
- …
The information that is required to provide such output is definitely present in Wikipedia, but it is not readily retrieved. The reason is that the information is hidden in the text of Wikipedias articles, such that automatic retrieval of the required data is just impossible (especially, because we would often like to gather data from all language Wikipedias!).
Thus, the only solution to problems as the above was to provide the required data sets manually, a method that is prone to errors and creates huge problems of maintenance and scalability. More recently, first attempts were made to overcome these restrictions. The basic idea is to enable computer-aided processing of (some parts of) Wiki-content by making certain information explicit that was otherwise hidden in natural language texts. Thus, one introduces ideas of semantic annotation into MediaWiki.
The purpose of this Wikiproject is to discuss and develop the possible ways to semantically enrich Wikipedia in a way that respects the specific requirements one finds in this context, in order to find solutions that meet the requirements of the single areas of use and that still allow strong cooperation between various semantically-enabled MediaWiki projects.
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