David Gerard wrote:
2008/12/4 Tim Landscheidt:
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.
Which is why we have zillions of obsessive nerdy humans writing the
encyclopedia. Tags are fine, there's nothing wrong intrinsically with
hundreds of tags where appropriate and useful. I suppose presentation
in Monobook will be interesting ...
- d.
If we're going to end up with hundreds of categories on each page, why
not make the software automatically add all parent categories?
It would fill the categorylinks table*, but it would as well by manually
adding them.
It would also require forcing the categories to be a graph and maybe
limiting the number of parent categories, as to reduce a bit how
expensive category position changes can be. But, if we leave that to
'manual actions', the same actions would be performed by bots, leading
to the same cost and partially less coherent structure.
*Add a expandedcategorylinks table?
Probably also add a 'don't inherit' flag on categary table which can be
appplied to high level categories such as 'All licenses' or 'Commons
root'.