On 6/3/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
I'm probably not the only one who envisages all the wonderful things that could be done with this massive collection of information that is Wikipedia, *if only* we could do something clever with the categories. And then you realise that you can't really do anything clever because "category" has all sorts of different meanings to different people.
........
So my questions are these: *Can anyone think of other types of categories I might have missed? *How could Wikipedia be better if this general problem was addressed? *How could this problem be addressed?
Steve
I'd say you can't, and possibly shouldn't try to address this. Any more rigorous and useful system would entail vast, vast amounts of work which no one wants to do (compare with the remarkable, even blockbuster sucess of en's Persondata - and Persondata is much easier than devising and implementing a rigorous category system, since such systems are domain-specific and simply *hard* to do well), especially when there are much more pressing issues, like simple accuracy or decent writing to worry about.
~maru