Friday 27 March 2009

Wikipedia as a good PSI-source?

I stumbled upon an interesting discussion in the blogpost Wikipedia - A Democratic Gold Standard for Topic Maps, where Vegard Sandvold suggests that the Topic Maps community "should adopt Wikipedia as it’s democratic and user-generated repository of topic PSI’s". (Lars Marius Garshol wrote a good blogpost about the general idea behind PSIs)

Steve Pepper disagrees, and argues that ideally the PSD (Published Subject Descriptor) should incude the minimum of information needed to unambiguously identify the subject.

Robert Engels then enters the discussion and argues from the RDF point of view.

My view is that I would currently use Wikipedia, because on some subjects it's the best source I got. I agree with Steve Pepper, but imagine that it could be useful in some contexts to be a bit fuzzy on purpose. A widely defined and a bit fuzzy subject might be exactly want we want, to be able to "start a conversation".

1 comment:

Con said...

Personally I wouldn't be too fazed by a PSD including a welter of details about the subject, some of which might be questionable or even plain wrong. So long as that doesn't actually render the identification ambiguous it doesn't really matter does it?