On 12/13/06, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
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?
I don't think there are any simple dichotomies in this. Different kinds of stuff have different kinds of categorisational needs.
We have a current trend towards splitting big categories. We prefer a single category "Dutch authors" rather than adding two massive categories to an article: "Dutch people" and "Authors". However this approach is pretty clearly a dead-end: how many times can we split? What do we split on next, "Dead Dutch authors"? Good category intersections would really help that one...
I guess you're right in that people are just made up of attributes: where/when they're born/died, what field they were primarily in etc, all of which could be much more complex trees.
Steve