[WikiEN-l] CATEGORIES!!!!!!

[Steve Bennett]

On 4/10/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> Ok, humor this computer-language challenged person: what the hell is a
> "tag"?

I don't know if there is a precise definition of a tag or a category,
but basically "tags" are more free-form. On a photo-sharing site, you
might tag a picture of person riding a donkey in the middle of new
york with tags like "donkey", "new york", "wtf", "dangerous",
"traffic" etc. The idea is to make it easy to find images which are in
some way "similar" to this one. No one really defines the tags in
advance: they're just words that you could associate with the image,
and there's no precise definition of each tag.

Our categories are generally more rigid: people organise them, create
hierarchies, and define rules for them: "elephants" should only
contain real elephants, not stuffed toys in the shape of elephants.
Famous elephants should be in "famous elephants", which is a
subcategory of "elephants". It's a good system in theory, but has
several problems, one of which is the lack of software support for
retrieving a list of all the items of a category and its
subcategories. And of course, there's nothing stopping subcategories
including the parent category, causing a loop.

Another major problem is that cases like yours ("accidental deaths")
aren't really categories at all, they're attributes. Harold Holt was a
former Australian prime minister. He *wasn't* an accidental death. He
*had* an accidental death. It's an interesting attribute, and perhaps
worth searching for, but somehow it would be nice to be able to
distinguish the real categories from the attributes.

Steve