Marc Riddell wrote:
But thrashed out to what conclusion?
That I do not know, and I'm sorry if I gave the impression it had been. (I wrote "thrashed out" instead of "hashed out" in an attempt to suggest that there had probably been more thrashing than concluding -- though I wasn't part of the earlier discussions, so I don't even know.)
My own take on the question is that Categories in their current form are an imprecise mechanism, and that people should not try to use them for precise tasks, or waste too much time arguing about particular attempted more-precise usages.
We could speculate about nice, more-precise technical solutions to the problem, which would support those more-precise usages. But (like [[m:Wikidata]]), it's not clear when or if mainstream mediawiki might ever get such improvements, nor is it clear that it even should. The relative simplicity of mediawiki -- the absence of complicated features with technophiles (like me!) are always wishing it had in support of more-precise usages -- this simplicity is of course a huge strength, and I suspect that it's more responsible for Wikipedia's success than I'd like to admit. (Which is to say, technical advances like more-precise categories and taggable data, which I would dearly love to see, are even more out of the question than I already fear they are.)