The previous talk page on Wikipedia about the "CG tools" page

On Wikipedia the CG tools page has been deemed "in need of being Wikified" and "too technical" and was finally removed on October 2006 by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Centrx User:Centrx] with the following comment: "Not an encyclopedia article".

Here is the talk page that existed before the deletion of the article.


Comment about the need to "wikify" this article

The only provided hints about the need to wikify this page were (i) "it looks ugly" and (ii) in the Guide to layout, "Articles generally comprise prose paragraphs, not bullet points" (this may be an indication that tables should probably be avoided too). However, precision and conciseness require structures such as tables and indented lists. Many Wikipedia pages would be much more precise, informative and easier to understand if taxonomies were given instead of using sentences, e.g., the pages related to [[Logic]]. The tables below have been specially designed for precision and conciseness in order to permit the comparison of tools. Using other structures or sentences would lead to an useless mess. -- Philippe Martin, 22 January 2006


Cleanup: article not accessible, possible merge/deletion candidate

The format and content of this article raise some concerns for me. It is a technical categorization of various CG tools, and as such it is not accessible to readers outside of the CG speciality. It might be better to merge this article into the [[Conceptual Graphs]] article, or eliminate this article altogether. -- Davnor, 17 April 2006

This article must be separated from the [[Conceptual Graphs]] article for modularity reasons since there are many things to cover regarding CG tools. One of these things is a technical categorization of various CG tools. It may need to be put into another page if the [[CG tools]] page grows too much but it is needed to permit people (and, a fortiori, the CG community) to have some clues into what features the current CG tools have or can have, and thus compare them (or compare them with other ontology editing tools). I do not think that removing this article (the [[CG tools]] page or the feature categorisation page) would increase the interest of non-technical readers in Wikipedia. On the other hand, adding more precise and technical information to Wikipedia would increase the interest of technical readers. Many scientific-oriented pages in Wikipedia are frustatingly superficial and ambiguous (e.g., the pages related to [[Logic]]). They would be more precise, informative and easier to understand if tables and taxonomies were given instead of using sentences. The tables used in the [[CG tools]] page have been specially designed for precision and conciseness in order to permit the comparison of tools. Using other structures or sentences would lead to an useless mess. -- Philippe Martin


The format ([[en:fixed-width]] text tables using spaces for alignment and relying on a lengthy symbol key), sacrifices readability in favor of ease of future updates, a choice that does not seem appropriate. -- Davnor, 17 April 2006

I strongly disagree: 1) using regular tables would hardly improve the readability of the displayed page but would make it extremely difficult and error-prone to make additions or updates (and, after all, making the updates of Wikipedia as easy as possible is the only reason why HTML is not used directly, despite the advantages that using HTML directly would have), 2) furthermore, the indentation of the features (which is absolutely essential to convey the subsumption hierarchy of the features) would be difficult to introduce inside regular tables, 3) symbol keys permit concision (hence readability) and precision. -- Philippe Martin


Statements regarding the rationale for using this format ("This presentation scheme is adopted below because.. ") would be more appropriate on this talk page, not as part of the article. Also, explanations of the tags used to format the article ("Each categorization is within a "div" HTML element...") are distracting and should be kept on this talk page. -- Davnor, 17 April 2006

I also disagree. The proposed format (table with feature hierarchies + symbol) is essential for readability and this format needs to be explained (in order to be followed) and its rationale (the impossibility to use traditional means if precision and readability are to be achieved) must be given. This must be done in the document, even if this is further justified in its talk page (which anyway no one would think to look at to find such information). -- Philippe Martin