Roger Luethi wrote:
On Sat, 03 Jun 2006 19:54:27 +0200, Steve Bennett 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.
Agreed. Still: can you give some specific examples of wonderful things that could be done but are not possible now? That would tell us what problem you are trying to solve.
So far I have identified four rough types of categories. I'll invent the notion a(X) to mean that article X is in category a. a(b(X)) means that a is a subcategory of b, and X is in b.
ITYM "b is a subcategory of a".
Taxonomies: Tend to end in "s" and satisfy the rule that "If a(X) then X is an a") is a logical sentence. Tend to form strict hierarchies, where if a(X) and b(a), then it's perfectly natural and normal that b(a(X)). Eg, Bridges in France is a subcat of Bridges, and every entry in "bridges in France" is definitely a Bridge. It's rare for an article to be in more than two taxonomic categories at once.
"Bridges in France" may not be the best example. "Bridges in France" is just an intersection of two attributes ("in France", "Bridges"), and their relative position in a hierarchy is undefined. Hence more than one hierarchy: You can drill down "France" ... "Buildings and structurces in France" or "Bridges" ... "Bridges by country".
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There are a few proposals on how to do this; most of them are in the "See also" section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Category_math_feature, specifically CatScan http://tools.wikimedia.de/~daniel/WikiSense/CategoryIntersect.php and the MediaWiki extension DynamicPageList http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/DynamicPageList; an extended version, DPL2, is described at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/DynamicPageList2.