On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 21:06:57 +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
better method), it could become the dominant method. Suddenly wading in and reorganising category hierarchies is probably doomed, otoh.
Yes, something to keep in mind. Finding a better system is not trivial, but it is the easiest part.
leave [[Category:Bridges]] alone and create [[is a:Bridge]] (or, without software changes, [[Category:is a Bridge]]).
Or even {{isa|bridge}} ? Can anything useful be done with templates' "what links here"?
Not as far as I can tell. It would only distinguish relation types. Plus it's a hack.
That said, it seems that you are overestimating the importance of one type of relationships at the expense of others.
I think I agree. Let me try something: say we make a shallow "taxonomy" tree (or not even tree?) and allow attributes instead to be hierarchical:
Paris "isa city" +in France ("isa city" is the taxonomy, +in France is the attribute) Now, +in France can be a subattribute of +in Europe (and it could have been made +in Ile de France or whatever)
With the current software, that could be implemented as:
[[Paris]] [[Category:is a city]] [[Category:is a (is there a name for "city or town or village or some other place"?)]] [[Category:in France]] (or [[Category:located in France]]) [[Category:in Europe]]
Okay.
Britney Spears "isa person" +female +singer +alive +singer could be a subattribute of +entertainer
What i see is (I added more information for illustration):
[[Britney Spears]] [[Category:is a singer]] [[Category:is an entertainer]] [[Category:is a person]] [[Category:is a child actor]] [[Category:is an entertainer]] [[Category:is a person]] [[Category:is alive]] [[Category:is female]] [[Category:born 1981]] [[Category:born in McComb, Mississippi]] (that kind of category would be hard to maintain manually) [[Category:born in Mississippi]] [[Category:born in the United States]]
Here are some other fun (existing!) categories from said article:
Worst Actress Razzie: "won a Worst Actress Razzi" Soubrettes: "is a soubrette", I guess!? American child actors: ...? "is a child actor" or "was a child actor?" Hollywood Walk of Fame: Ugh. High school dropouts: Ahm?
Pont du Gard "isa aqueduct" +in France, +Roman-built "isa aqueduct" can be a subcategory of "isa bridge" and "isa construction"
[[Pont du Gard]] [[Category:is an aqueduct]] [[Category:is a bridge]] [[Category:is a construction]] [[Category:in France]] [[Category:built by Romans]] (?)
This seems to be relatively clean, despite the fact that the attribute hierarchies have different meanings: "in" as opposed to "is a specialisation of".
Agreed.
Basically what I'm proposing now is keeping taxonomies quite strict, and allowing greater flexibility in attributes. So we'll always know whether an item is a soccer team or a city, but we may lose information on the finer details if the attributes aren't managed
Examples?
Some hierarchies are perfectly natural and useful but are not "is a" relationships (Europe - France - Paris, Family - Genus - Species).
I don't quite understnd your second example. "Rattus rattus" "is a" "Rattus" is ok isn't it?
It is. But "species" is not a genus. Like city is not a country.
Many attributes are perfectly natural and useful but they tend not to fit hierarchies well. You starting using them as soon as you sketched out the supposedly taxonomic category women. There simply is no natural taxonomic hierarchy for women, just a bunch of attributes.
Yeah, I see that. So, we stop the taxonomy at "person", and instead have hierarchical attributes? Is this actually far from the current situation? Hmm.
I see two major problems with the status quo: * multi-concept categories (American child actors) force us to maintain a complex system of subcategories (but they paper over shortcoming in the software). The German WP shows it doesn't have to be this way, but it might be difficult to convince people on WP:en until Mediawiki can create intersections * categories with unclear relations that are used for everything
We can fix both problems without changes to the software (but it still comes at a cost). However, we are dangerously close to inventing a poor man's version of a semantic wiki.
I think overall, having objects in a hierarchy is not the goal in itself - the goal is organising information, being able to group related information, and being able to make meaningful statements such as "43% of our articles are about people".
My impression is that the German WP is pretty close to that. But categories are also an important navigation aid, and that's where WP:de falls short.
Yeah, that doesn't work well. Better to use semantic attributes, possibly with antonym relationships built in (not sure of the immediate use, but it's probably helpful to distinguish between living/not living/unknown. So, to look for your female polish chemist, you simply look for person (or possibly, chemist), +female +polish.
Yup.
Where's {{Category:Polish chemists}} coming from? Defined on a separate
Defined on a separate page by someone who thought it was a meaningful and useful category, and worth spending 2 minutes making.
Number of countries: > 200 Occupations: hundreds
Not every country has people in every occupation, but these are just two attributes. That's many times 2 minutes. We should not have to do this manually.
page? And do we also add {{Category:Female chemists}} and {{Category:Polish physicists}} and {{Category:Polish women}} to the same article?
You could, and the software (small matter of programming) would be smart enough to take the superset of all these things:
Person +chemist +Polish Person +female +chemist Person +physicist +Polish Person +female +Polish
Net result: Person +chemist +physicist +female +Polish
Alternatively if you knew the attributes directly you could just do {{Polish chemists}} +female +physicist
_Or_ editors could simply add all the attributes and forget about the template. Attributes on [[de:Marie Curie]] (I'm not making this up):
woman chemist physicist polish (+ some more)
I guess splitting woman into person and female seemed too awkward to the Germans. Wimps.
Roger