The disambiguation could be challenging. (Does "The Sun" link to our closest star or the tabloid in the UK.)
It would be a fun project to try and determine the correct link based on the context.
It would be a fun project to try and determine the correct link based on the context.
Edit: found the link (PDF) http://www.cs.mtu.edu/~nilufer/classes/cs5811/2003-fall/hilt... Here's the actual quote:
“Do you mean Anthrax (the heavy-metal band),
anthrax (the bacterium) or anthrax (the disease)?”
“The bacterium,” was the typed answer, followed by
the instruction, “Comment on its toxicity to people.”
“I assume you mean people (homo sapiens),” the
system responded, reasoning, as it informed its
programmer, that asking about People magazine
“would not make sense.”When a search term matches a tag, and none of the tagged pages have a clear "majority probability" of being correct, it would display a list of all pages with the tag, in order of popularity.
Both of these things would be amazingly annoying to the majority of Wikipedia users.
But they could be disambiguated by humans, which is my point. Humans understand context.
Whether or not something like that would be a net win for Wikipedia is up for debate I guess. That said, I think they already do have a bot that can do at least a limited amount of auto-linkification, but I can't swear to it.
It would take some AI to work it out, unless using the context around the link. "Sun" could refer to many things, its not really possible for wikipedia to know which one you're on about. So links are still done manually.