Steve Bennett wrote:
On 6/6/06, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I'm deliberately leaving the "or its subcategories" off of the is-a template, so that we can continue having things like [[Category:Seattle]] be a subcategory of [[Category:Cities in Washington]] (or whatever the real category names are) like we do now.
I think we just decided in the long thread that that's a bad idea as follows: Cities in Washington is a taxonomic category Seattle is a thematic category Thematic categories should never be subcategories of taxonomic categories (although the reverse is ok)
If your proposal is to allow for a graceful changeover, then I understand.
I don't think a "changeover" is needed, and I don't see why thematic categories being subcategories of taxonomic categories is a bad thing provided the categories are all properly labelled. The way things are now are pretty intuitive for human browsing, which makes sense since humans are the ones that organized it the way it is. But if you want to spider a collection of articles on a taxonomic basis (for example building a list of all cities in the United States with articles) then all you need to do is write the spider to ignore subcategories that aren't labelled as taxonomic. It'll ignore [[Category:Seattle]] and all the contents thereof.
Seems to me that forbidding thematic subcategories to taxanomic categories will result in a huge number of orphaned thematic categories.