Gregory Maxwell wrote:
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.
True, but there are _some_ relationships that should always hold. All
dogs are animals. All integers are numbers. All places in New York are
in the United States. Arguably, any page which is in [[Category:Dogs]]
but not in [[Category:Animals]] is a failure of atomic categorization.
Of course, there are also many relationships that _don't_ hold so
strictly. Most dogs are pets, but not all. Most places in the United
States are in North America, but not all. So, yes, some of the
consistency checking will have to be done at least partly manually.
But really, I wouldn't worry about this too much. Sure, having a way to
enforce some category relationships would be useful, as would
automatically recommending others. But even if we don't implement it
immediately in the software, someone will write a bot (or several) to
help with it. It won't be perfect, but I wouldn't expect it to be much
more broken than the current interlanguage link system, which we
consider useful enough to keep deployed despite its numerous failings.
(While thinking about this, I thought back to an earlier discussion on
this list (or possibly wikien-l, can't remember now) about the fact that
there are essentially two types of categories: thematic and taxonomic.
For the former, the "tag" model of atomic categorization is quite
natural, but the latter would fit much more naturally into a strictly
hierarchical model. It might not be an entirely unreasonable idea to
formally split the two, perhaps even into separate namespaces, and apply
different technical approaches to handling them.)
--
Ilmari Karonen