As some of you may have noticed, I have been creating many lemma articles, typically under political/ideological/influence groups, think thanks, etc., about individuals. The entries, unless they grow to full articles, emphasize the group affiliations and perhaps individual mentors/proteges.
Underlying this is the idea of incorporating, into CZ, the sort of information that is available from certain political network databases. While, for example, we cannot make a sourced statement about someone's beliefs, I like the idea of a user having the information available that the individual belongs to five groups that have the flat earth as a position, studied at six institutions with a Flat Earth Department, and has mentored seven Professors of Flat Earthism.
One of the hardest issues of this sort of thing is physically presenting the information. Many of the political science ones use a graphic model, but this gets extremely complex for influential, highly connected people. Still, assuming they are up-to-date, Related Articles pages have the raw data for much of this.
The Semantic Web and related technologies are relevant here, and the neuroscientists/connectionists think about this a lot. Perhaps there might be a way to designate certain articles as candidates for semantic/connectionist mapping.
Another issue is maintenance, for which we have a partial solution, which I've discussed briefly with Daniel. The Related Article bot now runs once per article. For certain expliciitly designated articles/links, it may be useful for rerunning it and adding suggested maintenance updates to Related Articles pages. In some cases, the lists may grow so large (e.g., a political party) that a Catalog may be more appropriate than a related article R-template.
As one example beloved of the conspiracy theorists, consider membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, or attendance at Davos/World Economic Forum, etc. Consider membership in political parties.
I see no easy way to handle resignations, most end of elected terms, etc.
I would, however, like to start discussion. Shamira and her students may have particular insight, because I think these linkages are valuable data for people studying the sorts of policy-influencing groups she has assigned as Eduzendium projects.
An at least minimally useful linkage mapper would be a huge differentiator from WP. In no way do I underestimate the maintenance. Just as an example, I added a lemma article for
Al-Shabab, an Islamist group about which I had never heard before, but was the target of a U.S. counterterrorism raid yesterday (or perhaps that is when it was announced) in Somalia. Since I didn't think there was anything about it, I did go ahead and create Related Articles, in which al-Qaeda is listed. Should I have to manually add it to al-Qaeda's subtopics? Arguments both ways...
