On 12/14/06, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
It didn't evolve into an unfocused mess -- it started as an unfocused mess. As did Wikipedia. We don't necessarily need a small committee of experts to "fix" the "problems" of Wikipedia.
One of the things that makes Wikipedia great is its flexibility.
My understanding is that most processes in WP start small and unfocussed, spread out to become large and unfocussed, then are slowly refine and are distilled to become small and focussed again. For example, a policy document usually starts with some rant by an individual. It expands as other individuals join in the ranting. Then common sense starts to emerge. Finally, it can be reduced to a couple of sentences that are actually helpful.
With categories, I think we've got to the "huge mess" stage, but I don't see a lot of distillation or refining going on.
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.
On a practical level, it's obviously very useful to have both the cat and supercat on an article sometimes. The prohibition on this presupposes some mediawiki treatment of sub/supercats that just doesn't exist.
Steve