On 4/29/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/29/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 4/29/07 10:38 AM, John Lee at johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
I still maintain that categories are the best way to organise our
content,
provided that we have unions and intersections. Tags simply don't
provide
the necessary hierarchy and structure to make organising content
simple
and
easy; they're excellent for random browsing, but not so much for
hunting
down specific articles.
I agree with you completely, John. It's just that the present state of
the
Category system is completely out of control. The existing Policies on Categorization have become more complicated than the U.S. Tax Code; and, those that can be deciphered are being completely ignored. I, for one,
am
not sure how much more cerebral RAM and emotional energy I want to spend on this.
The status quo is patently unacceptable. The question now is, where can we get the expertise necessary to write the requisite code for intersections and unions, and further, how can we stem these increasingly complex and arcane policies? The latter is simple; as policy is descriptive, not prescriptive, use common sense when categorising, unless you feel the situation is too complex for your common sense to be right. The former is a more difficult problem to solve.
Johnleemk
You need a librarian for this. We're trying to do everything for free and voluntary at Wikipedia, but categorizing things requires an overarching scheme and Wikipedia is implemented and run to prevent just this.
I had a number of group programming assingments in school (long ago), and one woman in the class was a reject for all groups, as she was a lousy programmer. I let her be in our group, figuring she couldn't harm my programs. Turns out she was a librarian, and when it came to writing databases we kicked everyone else's butts. It always seemed so easy after she organized everything, but there is no way I have the skills to do what she did, because she understood how categories work--and she knew that you had to start at the top (all the programmers here are thinking, of couse, that in those days that was what programmers were supposed to do, too), and she knew where to place the top.
Nobody on Wikipedia or Wikimedia even knows what categories are, much less how they work, as far as I can tell. Set theory? Probably no one understands that either.
KP