[WikiEN-l] Main & Sub Categories

[Steve Bennett]

On 2/16/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> appears in that Category, but not in the Category: Cancer deaths. Shouldn't
> he appear in this Category also since cancer is what he died from? It seems
> the only way to accomplish this is to include both Categories in his
> Article. However, when I have done this in the past, in other similar
> situations, I have gotten a whole lot of grief. What gives?

This discussion pretty well summarises a perennial problem with
categories. There are two choices: Put the article in the broad
category and its subcategory, or just in the subcategory.

Problems with putting it in both categories: The broad category can
get unmanageably large and impossible to navigate.
Problems with putting in just the subcategory: There is no software
support to retrieve the set of all articles in all subcats and the
broad category. There is also no sufficiently tight definitino of
"subcategory" to distinguish between true (taxonomic) subcategories
and rough (thematic) subcategories. A lung cancer death is truly a
cancer death. But someone born in Strasbourg is not truly someone born
in France[1] (and there are much better examples than this).

Steve
[1] IIRC, Strasbourg has previously been part of Germany, so you can't
assume that a Strasbourgeois was actually born in France.