On 4/30/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
Tracy,
Your point is very well made. The difference I see in our searches is that you want to exclude a certain set of data, and mine is geared toward including a certain set of data.
From a point of view of sets, inclusion and exclusion are essentially
similar (including all of the continents except Africa is the same as excluding Africa from the set of continents, after all).
This may very well be a matter of software, which is an area I know absolutely nothing about. My solution of including both main & sub categories in the same Article is based on what I understand about the process - which is about as elementary as it gets. In fact, I am open to any solution that meets the needs I cited above.
I think that it would be best served by a change of software. Your solution would serve your purpose at the cost of mine, while a change in software to support unions/intersections would serve both of us. However, I don't know PHP (which I believe is what the mediawiki is written in), so I am unfortunately unable to do anything about it.
Of course, I am open to other solutions as well--I'm just hesitant to implement any solutions which reduce existing functionality, as yours would do. 'First, do no harm' is also important here, I think.
Tracy Poff