On 4/9/07, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/10/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 4/9/07 8:12 PM, Steve Bennett at stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Um, what changes? If anything, it's probably a bunch of little changes caused by different people. I doubt very much that there's a single person who inflict a set of changes on the rest of us with some clear purpose behind it all that they haven't explained.
Steve,
I've been through this enough to be frustrated with it.
The reality is: In an Article about a person who died from lung cancer; if I would add both the Categories "Cancer deaths" & "Lung cancer deaths" - someone would come along very quickly and delete the main Cancer death Category. If I go back and re-enter the Cancer death Category - the same thing would happen. Options: engage in an editing war, or give up in frustration. I choose the latter. This is happening every day!
I agree with Thomas Dalton -- this is largely an issue about software features and tools to explore the relationship between categories and subcategories. It may be frustrating not being able to browse them easily right now, but fundamentally it's likely the right way to do it. Perhaps the harder question is how to get it listed as a priority for Mediawiki development.
For an example of what can be done with categories, see: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CategoryTree
I'd say tags are not an accurate (or desirable) way to describe the category feature. Categories are much more like traditional taxonomy -- they are a controlled vocabulary with hierarchical relationships. Tags are uncontrolled and flat.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
I'd almost think that what we want is to change default category display. If we have "Cancer Deaths", with a child subcategory of "Lung Cancer Deaths", with a child subcategory of "Lung Cancer Deaths due to Smoking", it would be nice if instead of a pile of category stuff at the bottom, we just had one line per category with the bottom category, intermediate ones, and top one listed per line. So one line with "Cancer Deaths -> Lung Cancer Deaths -> Lung Cancer Deaths due to Smoking", all appropriately hotlinked.
We have the screen real estate to do that.