On 06/06/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
That brings up another, longer term, to-do for categories: they should be language independent. For instance [[Marie Curie]] is in de: and en: (they happen to have the same title, but even if they don't they are linked via interwiki links). [[Kategorie:Pole]] is linked to [[Category:Polish people]]. So there should be no need to categorize Marie Curie twice (multiply by the actual number of languages which have a Polish people category and an article on Marie Curie).
Hmm... it won't work well.
Basdically, there is no hard and fast en:Article <-> de:Artikel relationship, there's no single "meta topic" which manifests itself in specific articles in different languages. For some things, like people, it does appear so; for others, it'll break down.
This is partly due to the incomplete nature of the project, but also because different language communities - which, especially for languages like German and Polish, represent individual and reasonably distinct cultures in a way that en: doesn't - will naturally have different emphasis, there'll be different levels of coverage and different approaches to fragmenting articles.
Let's say, oh, [[History of Country]].
In one language, this might be a single article. In another, time-divided articles (overview; ancient history; history to 1500; 1500 to 1900; modern history). In a third, it might be a thematic divide (political history; religious history; military history; overview).
What combination of categories would work best for *all* of these pages?