Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:16 UTC
I've expirienced that in some cases I need one synonym for two pages, taht can not be realised with redirects one Example is Luxemburg, it's a country and a city, so I would like to have Luxemburg beeing synonym fpr Luxemburg_(Country) and Luxemburg_(City). A possible solution could be that on disambiguation a special property marks all synonyms Another possible solution could be that a special property could mark the "real name"
You suggest ways of specifying mutliple meanings for one ambiguous name. But how would SMW then choose which of those meanings to use in a query? Note that the current synonyms are treated as equality: the redirect and its target desribe the same object. If you add another object then, by transitivity of equality, all of the involved objects would have to be considered equal. Solving this seems to require a whole different mechanism.
For me it seams really simple, when I search for the population of Luxemburg I get two values, one for the Country and one for the city. When searching for Luxemburg in category city ein get one and when searching in category country I get the other one. Another possibility could also be that the String comparison function could also be used for type page. Then one could search for ~Luxemburg*
What your first description would be is a class Luxembourg containing all things synonymous to Luxembourg. You could then ask queries like {{#ask: [[Category:Luxembourg]] [[population::+]] | ...}} to select only things from your "Luxembourgs" that have a population. But of course one could also still have two names and simply state what one wants, like in {{#ask: [[Luxembourg (city)]] OR [[Luxembourg (country)]] | ...}} If you only are concerned about the display (i.e. "Luxembourg (city)" being not as pretty, even though it is possibly more informative), then you can use a property to assign a name and use a query that prints this name instead of the page title. Using a template, this can still be a link. But I think it is quite useful that one can see which population number belongs to which thing; it might no always be as obvious as for populations to find out what meaning a certain appearance of "Luxembourg" would have. Given that all various workarounds are possible already, and that the suggestion would require more complex checks/computations in standard query processing, I do not think it would be good to add this feature to SMW. I close as "Wontfix".
