On 4/4/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
I don't supposed you've seen the wonders that can be achieved with http://tools.wikimedia.de/~daniel/WikiSense/CategoryIntersect.php by any chance?
I have. It is wonderful. But it's not integrated into MediaWiki. Perhaps all I really want is that if you add some subcategory to an article, all the parent categories are added automatically (perhaps in smaller text or something).
Or perhaps I want a really tight definition of "subcategory", which doesn't seem to exist. There are at least two distinct meanings (and uses) of the relationship A = subcategory(B) (fictitious examples)
- Definitive subcategories. Every item that could be tagged B could by definition be tagged A. For example, famous German artists/famous Germans - Fuzzy subsets: B itself is a kind of subdomain of A. e.g. Opera is a subdomain of Singing, but "Sydney Opera House" is not a kind of singing (but could well be categorised "Opera")
The problem may be that categories sometimes mean "is a" and sometimes mean "is related to". This is weakly hinted at in the category guidelines, which distinguish between "Operas" as an "is a" category, and "Opera" as a "related to" category. Intriguingly, "Operas" has three subcategories, subcategories of which are used to tag actual operas several times. For example, Don Giovanni falls into Italian Operas, Operas by Mozart, and Operas, as well as the "related to" category Melodrama). And this is a *well-organised* categorisation system.
Lastly, for some comic relief, check out the categories on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brokeback_Mountain
Can you work out which categories are misapplied? :)
Steve