I don't know that what I am asking for is as complex as your example. Cancer
Lung cancer. Suicides > Suicides by firearm >> Deaths by firearm. I believe
limiting the number (and specificity) of the subcategories would help to keep the process within manageable limits.
Marc
From: Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 20:16:25 +0100 To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Hello
Sam Korn schreef:
On 12/12/06, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
I don't understand how it would defeat the purpose of subcats. My goal is to be able to retrieve lists of persons with like characteristics. Unless a person is included in a subcategory, they will not be included in that list. A person who dies from lung cancer, also belongs in the larger list of persons who died from cancer.
The suggestion is that some kind of tool -- as yet, I believe unwritten -- could generate a list of all members of a category and its subcategories. I imagine this would suit your purpose.
Unfortunately, it would not. At least, not completely. Categorization is not transitive: if article A is a member of category C, and C is a subcat of D, A need not be a member of D. For example: [[Seine]] is in [[Category:Paris]], which is in [[Category:Cities in France]], which is in [[Category:France]], which is in [[Category:Republics]], which ultimately is a subcat of [[Category:Thought]].
But the Seine is not a thought, a republic, or a city in France.
Categories as implemented now have mixed meanings: they can describe "is-a", "has-a" or "is-related-to" connections. See earlier discussions on this list in September 2004 and June 2006 (http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/htdig/wikien-l/2006-June/048183.html).
Eugene _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l