Content equals schema

From DoWire Wiki

This is a wiki best practice.

The collection of all intra-wiki links within wiki page content is a homeomorphism of the schema. In the abstract, any one page is both a singleton object in a relational database, and together with the surrounding text also maps relations to others of these objects. So the collection of all known topics is both the content and the schema for the database. Even if a page does not exist, the fact that it is referenced makes it exist at least as a request to edit a page by that name. In mediawiki any open link is interpreted as such a request - if you click on it, you are asked to create a page by that name.

The collection of inter-wiki links is an interface between different naming schemes, schemas, meta-schemas or taxonomies or ontologies. There are a great many such schemes. One famous collection of library catalogues, at the Harbord Library in the University of Toronto, includes WELL OVER A THOUSAND such schemes in the English language alone.

For open content, the only schema that is readily available (anyone can edit) and extensive (over one million articles, half in English, half in other languages) and in a great many languages (dozens) is the GFDL corpus which takes its naming cues more or less only from Wikipedia. See topic naming conventions for more on the implications of this.