Wikilink use-cases
I'm a big fan of semantic markup and miss this functionality in SMW. I know that one of the goals of "The Platform" is to create a technology-independent ontology that uses a minimal set of markup available in various CMS platforms, including wikis. But it isn't so simple as I'd like it to be. Wordpress and similar CMS' have categories and tags, while WikiMedia has only categories. SMW has categories and semantic markup, which I think can be abused in a fashion to create tag-like structures. Additionally, on this site we have DLP, which seems to function similarly to semantic markup, but can't be counted on to be available on other platforms. For this reason, I have tried to devise uses for categories that suit different use-cases like tag clouds and semantic markup. It hasn't been easy. Actually, I have been mulling these issues over for a few months, but this is the first time I have attempted to do so in writing.
One of the things i don't like about using category, and consider a misapplication is the case where an article should belong to multiple categories not in a hierarchy, for example, tag clouds. MediaWiki doesn't have this separate use, and furthermore, I find annoying the verbosity of repeating the category markup multiple times in an article. For this reason I created two templates: {{tag}} and {{tags}}. Orginally my intention was to use category like a tag cloud markup and avoid the surreptitious use of [[category:x]][[category:y]][[category:z]]. Then I saw that tag can be used to mark keywords inline and leave a visible link in context meanwhile creating or linking to a category by the same name. Second, {{tags|a|b|c|d}} was meant to quickly mark a page for keywords but make them hidden in context. Both naturally belong in the category hierarchy tags>tag, but otherwise are not necessarily hierarchical as the intended use of category is.
The philosophy behind this use is certainly different than the hierarchical use of categories, and although I have not discussed it with the other guys on the site, no one's complained so-far ;). What I have observed is that from regular use of tags emerges an entirely different structure than categorizing an article into one or a few classes.
What I really need here are diagrams, but for the time being, I'll try to use words to express what I see in my mind's eye.
Moreover, here we have a prevalent use of the see also section in articles, where links are loosely grouped instead of in context. This certainly is another separate use case that I think we should specify clearly.
