Steve,
It is clear to me from all of the dialogue, that the issue of Categories and their use in Wikipedia is not only controversial, but also pretty much unresolved and unfocused. And, what could be a powerful tool within Wikipedia has evolved into an unfocused mess. I believe it is going to take a small group of focused, objective persons, taking an equally focused, objective look at it, and formulate a set of firm guidelines for its use starting with, of course, its very purpose.
I would like to take the discussion back to my original question: May I include both a main category and a subcategory in the same article? I would like to accomplish this without creating an edit war with another editor who thinks it¹s wrong.
Marc
From: "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2006 15:19:43 +1100 To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Categories (was: Hello)
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.
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