I’m just cruising through the wikipedia and it’s interesting that sphere’s of academic disciplines overlap very heavily. Just using a wikiword to link between concepts (a very traditional hypertext method) leads to discipline bleed, you move into the definition of the word for another definition. The wikipedia is becoming something between a encyclopedia and a dictionary and not quite sure which it is. Also there are some highly technical descriptions of some terms.
I suppose the answer is to add more to each entry to describe the various jargon laden meanings. I also wonder if one could navigate through hypertext collections with some kind of subject specific sunglasses. Confine one’s self to a specific subject area. Mind you even that is a bit restrictive, borders between disciplines are breaking down and so they should. Cross-disciplinary bleed of concepts should be happening, just conflicting or misleading jargon is dangerous. I don’t know where I was going with this, except that I am generally impressed with the wikipedia since I last looked at it.
March 3rd, 2004 at 7:09 pm
And I think some of the hyperlinking between entries a bit spurious. Maybe that’s what was worrying me. When someone alludes to “two opposing traditions” on this page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics
I thought they would link to a page describing them. Not a definition of what tradition means. Which is essentially useless.
March 15th, 2004 at 1:52 am
Yeah, most of the links on wikipedia are fairly irrelevant to the page you’re actually reading, and just take you off on a wild tangent.
I think it’s a common mistake to think that having lots of inline hyperlinks is a good thing. Much better to have a few that are relevant - and sometimes it’s better to only see them at the end.