Why there should be no lists in Wikipedia

There are a lot of lists in Wikipedia. Lists are bad because they require maintenance. Maintenance is something the machine should do.

Some lists 'lists of childless people' are obviously unmaintainable, but lists of childless english cryptographers is rather different.

Categories are good, templates are better

A lot of links are made to years, some are birth dates, some battles etc. This leads to a mess.

Categories are good but 'Schools founded in the 16th century' is really an attempt to anticipate a search query.

What we need is a better template structure, possibly use typed data.

For example every biography should have a biography template giving date of birth, death, marriages, education, employment. The prose should give significant information.

There should be a template query interface, schools founded in the 16th century can now become a standing search - if it is really needed at all.

Solution Category templates

Templates are already used to put an article into a category.

Eliminating Lists

Lists can now be eliminated through a special template, members of category not entered into that category through an article. So if we have a list of public schools we may not have articles on every one, but we still want search to work

This approach might also eliminate the need people feel to create sub-stubs. If the only significant info we have on a school is membership of a category then it should be sufficient to declare that.

Problem Multiple Inheritance

The problem with templates is that they do not support multiple inheritance, Thatcher is an oxford alumni and a politician. This is not really problematic. But what about Bruce Scheneir who is a cryptographer and a security expert?

Robots to the rescue?

It is probably possible to auto-generate the category code from templates using a robot. This needs some thought.