User:Cburnett/Hierarchy

This is a proposal for changing the fundamental logical storage of articles on wikipedia.

Currently, all articles are stored in the same "directory," which can cause naming problems. Naming problems are currently solved by modifying the article name to include a category of sorts. For example, Washington vs. Washington Township vs. George Washington or The Alamo (1936 film) vs. The Alamo (1960 film). This is exactly like a flat file system where all files are stored in the same directory.

Instead, I propose a hierarchial system that builds in an implicit system of categorization. For example, take some articles from Enterprise:

/Television/Series/Science fiction/Star Trek/Ships/Federation/Enterprise/NCC-1701
/Television/Series/Science fiction/Star Trek/Ships/Federation/Enterprise/NCC-1701-A
/Television/Series/Science fiction/Star Trek/Ships/Federation/Enterprise/NCC-1701-B
/United States/NASA/Space Shuttles/Enterprise
/United States/Navy/Ships/Enterprise
/United States/Kansas/Enterprise
/United Kingdom/Navy/Ships/Enterprise
/Business/Terms/Free enterprise
/Psychology/Terms/Enterprise
/Canada/Northwest territories/Enterprise

Instead of manually creating and maintaining disambiguation pages, they could be generated on-the-fly (or a more optimized method).

Going to /Enterprise would yield a listing of all articles named Enterprise. For some, like "NCC-1701" this could be achieved by placing "also list as" tags (akin to Category or interwiki tags) inside the articles and so they would be listed just as if the article was named that.
Going to /United States/Enterprise would yield a listing of all articles named Enterprise under /United States (so /United States/NASA/Space Shuttles/Enterprise and /United States/Navy/Ships/Enterprise).

Really, categories are just a means of organizing articles in hierarchies (not necessarily a single hierarchy).

Consider a hierarchial system with both hard linking and symbolic linking. This would allow the same article to be listed in multiple folders. For example,

/Actors/United States/R/Reagan, Ronald
/Births/1911/Reagan, Ronald
/Deaths/2004/Reagan, Ronald
/United States/Presidents/Reagan, Ronald
/United States/California/Governor/Reagan, Ronald
/United States/California/Los Angeles/Deaths/2004/Reagan, Ronald
/United States/Illinois/Tampico/Births/1911/Reagan, Ronald
/United States/World War II/Veterans/Reagan, Ronald
/Wars/World War II/Veterans/Reagan, Ronald

All of these could by hard links to the same article. One method to make the hard links is with an additional tag with one tag per "directory".

Visiting "/Reagan, Ronald" would yield all of the above results (and more) which cold be consolidated under a single "Ronald Reagan" listing by detecting the link tags are of the same article. Perhaps the output could look like:

Ronald Reagan:

/Actors/United States/R
/Births/1911/February/6
/Deaths/2004/June/5
/United States/Presidents
/United States/California/Governor
/United States/California/Los Angeles/Deaths/2004/June/5
/United States/Illinois/Tampico/Births/1911/February/6
/United States/World War II/Veterans
/Wars/World War II/Veterans

Though only one article may be listed, a longer listing could be generated for "George Bush":

George Walker Bush

/Births/1946/July/6
/United States/Presidents
/United States/Connecticut/New Haven/Births/1946/July/6

George Herbert Walker Bush

/Births/1924/June/12
/United States/Presidents
/United States/Massachusetts/Milton/Births/1924/June/12

George Prescott Bush

/Births/1976/April/24

George Bush

/Births/1796/June/12
/Deaths/1859/September/19
/United States/New Hampshire/Universities/Dartmouth/Alumni
/Religion/Scholars

Or something like that (by no means is that complete, just a rough example).