On 4/10/07, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 4/10/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote:
on 4/9/07 8:12 PM, Steve Bennett at
stevagewp(a)gmail.com wrote:
Um, what changes? If anything, it's probably
a bunch of little changes
caused by different people. I doubt very much that there's a single
person who inflict a set of changes on the rest of us with some clear
purpose behind it all that they haven't explained.
Steve,
I've been through this enough to be frustrated with it.
The reality is: In an Article about a person who died from lung cancer;
if I
would add both the Categories "Cancer
deaths" & "Lung cancer deaths" -
someone would come along very quickly and delete the main Cancer death
Category. If I go back and re-enter the Cancer death Category - the same
thing would happen. Options: engage in an editing war, or give up in
frustration. I choose the latter. This is happening every day!
I agree with Thomas Dalton -- this is largely an issue about software
features and tools to explore the relationship between categories and
subcategories. It may be frustrating not being able to browse them
easily right now, but fundamentally it's likely the right way to do
it. Perhaps the harder question is how to get it listed as a priority
for Mediawiki development.
For an example of what can be done with categories, see:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CategoryTree
I'd say tags are not an accurate (or desirable) way to describe the
category feature. Categories are much more like traditional taxonomy
-- they are a controlled vocabulary with hierarchical relationships.
Tags are uncontrolled and flat.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
I agree with Andrew. I understand the frustration about the real precision
that obsessive categorisers have engendered which sometimes makes the
category system pointless, but at the same time, I also understand that this
frustration stems from technological problems rather than problems with how
we categorise articles. (Although if it's getting to the point where we have
a category for each article, then we've probably gone overboard...)
The way I see it, it really makes more sense to develop MediaWiki to the
point where intersections and unions of categories are possible and
feasible. This would resolve the problem nicely; for instance, if Marc wants
to see every article under [[Category:Lung cancer]], he just tells the
software to display the union of all subcategories (and presumably all their
subcats, and so on) under [[Category:Lung cancer]].
At the same time, though I don't like the tag system that's become almost
omnipresent in blogs (mainly for the same reasons Andrew has articulated), I
don't see why it shouldn't be ruled out. It'd be nice to have, and I
don't
see how it could hurt - although obviously since, as David notes, it'll
place a huge strain on our servers, it shouldn't be implemented until we
have the technical horsepower to handle it. Also, tags should come secondary
to a better process for handling categories - I think it'd be far more
invaluable to support unions and intersections of categories rather than to
simply have tags for articles.
Johnleemk