On 4/10/07, 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 agree with Andrew. I understand the frustration about the real precision that obsessive categorisers have engendered which sometimes makes the category system pointless, but at the same time, I also understand that this frustration stems from technological problems rather than problems with how we categorise articles. (Although if it's getting to the point where we have a category for each article, then we've probably gone overboard...)
The way I see it, it really makes more sense to develop MediaWiki to the point where intersections and unions of categories are possible and feasible. This would resolve the problem nicely; for instance, if Marc wants to see every article under [[Category:Lung cancer]], he just tells the software to display the union of all subcategories (and presumably all their subcats, and so on) under [[Category:Lung cancer]].
At the same time, though I don't like the tag system that's become almost omnipresent in blogs (mainly for the same reasons Andrew has articulated), I don't see why it shouldn't be ruled out. It'd be nice to have, and I don't see how it could hurt - although obviously since, as David notes, it'll place a huge strain on our servers, it shouldn't be implemented until we have the technical horsepower to handle it. Also, tags should come secondary to a better process for handling categories - I think it'd be far more invaluable to support unions and intersections of categories rather than to simply have tags for articles.
Johnleemk