On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 7:12 PM, Daniel Schwen <lists(a)schwen.de> wrote:
Uhm, yeah.. except that intersection of atomic
categories are not vaporware.
We had proofs of concept for that and the interest was marginal.
Vaporware with proofs of concept is still vaporware. The definition
of vaporware is more or less something that doesn't go *beyond* proofs
of concept. Category intersection has never been added to the
software and there's no timetable for adding it to the software, so
doing any recategorization right *now* to aid category intersection
would be pointless. JS thingies may have been enabled on some wikis
for some time periods, but that's very different from a feature being
prominently added to *all* wikis.
On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 8:16 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
With a JS hack I had my tool integrated to the site.
The AJAX calls
went to the toolserver, but as far as the users could see it was
running on the site. No one cared: It didn't produce useful results
because of how categories are used, and when I suggested changing
people just waved their arms at me "just make it walk the tree".
What was the interface like (how noticeable/obtrusive), how long was
it up, and why did it get removed? You're certainly going to need a
critical mass of people who know about it and use it before there will
be any effect. And enabling it on all wikis at once would likely
help, too: if Germans get used to using it on dewiki and find it
useful, they'll be more likely to push for it to be made useful on
Commons.
On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 7:45 AM, Tim Landscheidt <tim(a)tim-landscheidt.de> wrote:
Add to that the maintenance costs because you would
want to
ensure that if someone who is not aware of the concept of
atomic categories adds a [[Category:Manhattan]] to something
he adds [[Category:New York]], [[Category:East Coast of the
United States]], [[Category:United States]] and the other
gigazillion umbrella categories as well so searches for a
building in a country bordering a water body will still show
results.
A reasonable point. In the medium term it could be handled by (you
guessed it) bots. In the longer term, allowing people to define more
concrete semantic relationships between categories (e.g., "X is
partitioned into X1, X2, ..., Xn") could make this automatic within
the software itself.
In the end, all of these objections are really irrelevant to the
technical issues here. The fact of the matter is that category
intersection is widely supported in other major software products (in
the form of tag intersection), it's something that a lot of people
want, and so it would be good if it were in the core software. How
fully various specific communities would want to use it is up to them
-- that some communities might never choose to use a particular
feature doesn't mean that it shouldn't be developed (cf. FlaggedRevs,
etc.).