On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 7:25 AM, Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
[snip]
Because adding the parents produces non-sense results because
"categorization" is a flawed concept except at the most fuzzy and
course levels: Reality doesn't fit into neat nested boxes (not even
the N-dimensional ones created by multiple parentage). The two
primary problems are semantic drift (the further away you get from a
relationship the more not-quite-matching error accumulates), and
multiple link types (we use categories to describe different types of
membership, and while within a type the membership relation is
commutative among types it is usually not). So with parentages you
get chains like [periodic table]->[hydrogen]->[hydrogen
compounds]->[water]->[places with water]->[beaches]->[beaches in
america]->[beaches of lalaville]->[lalavill
beach]->[Image:Ironmeteor_at_lalavill_beach.jpg]
Is an iron meteor a "beach in america" or a "hydrogen compound"? No.
Offering all the parents with an easy checkbox interface that allows
you quickly adopt all that apply would be great, but forcing their
inclusion would produce rubbish.