It is beginning to dawn on me (perhaps the sun rises later here) that there is/would be a great difference between categorizing biographical articles v. non-biographical ones. The biographical would require much less complex layers. Any thoughts on this?
Marc Riddell
From: "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2006 14:17:29 +1100 To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Categories (was: Hello)
On 12/13/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
By which I mean, the argument usually boils down to trying to decide precisely whether category membership is supposed to denote an "is-a", "has-a" or "is-related-to" relationship. But that can't be answered, so the arguments can never really be resolved, and people have to fall back to using categories not to implement rigid OO-like inheritable hierarchies, but rather, looser collections where the only semantic attached to category membership is "is-kinda-related-to". Some categories and the
Well, yeah, unfortunately this is basically true. We should have a well-defined category structure, or use really loose and flexible keywords...we sort of have the worst of both worlds here.
"Category:Arrondissements in Paris" and "Category:Topics relating to Paris", rather than just "Category:California" and "Category:Paris". And we're probably doing a lot of that today.
The downside is it's much easier to guess "Paris" as a category name than "Topics relating to Paris". What would actually be good would be stronger, semi-automated systems for funnelling people's guesses into the right names. There's nothing wrong with someone guessing "Paris" if a bot can then channel that into the correct name - or at least highlight it for human recategorisation. Just like we don't "object" to people adding {{stub}} - we have people that come along and do the stage two recategorisation.
Wikis work very well when you tolerate this kind of behaviour - don't ask for perfection up front, but instead appreciate every micro-improvement.
But there are still (and will always be) lots of problems when categories contain other categories, and we'll always be wondering whether category membership is or isn't or should or shouldn't be transitive, and it's these larger-scale questions which we can't (under the current architecture) ever fully satisfactorily resolve.
Well we've discussed this at length, and I think we can go some way towards resolving it through either naming conventions or some other way of formally describing categories. Good rules might be "This category should not directly contain pages.", "This category is a geographical hierarchy.", "This category is thematic" etc.
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