On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 13:51:33 +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
Ok. I suspect rules like "Express X by doing Y and Z" are going to work better than "Don't do X".
Right. But more importantly, the way categories are used is thorougly entrenched and I suspect your chances to change it are close to zero even assuming you could make it a policy.
It would be easier to create clean trees in a parallel namespace. Say, leave [[Category:Bridges]] alone and create [[is a:Bridge]] (or, without software changes, [[Category:is a Bridge]]).
That said, it seems that you are overestimating the importance of one type of relationships at the expense of others.
Some hierarchies are perfectly natural and useful but are not "is a" relationships (Europe - France - Paris, Family - Genus - Species).
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.
Now _if_ you want to draw a natural hierarchy with women in it, try genealogy. But guess what? That's another type of relationship that we can't deal with (X is ancester of Y, Y is ancestor of Z).
Would it be credible to say that for 90% of the time the new system is better, and for the other 10% we leave it the way it is?
Not without supporting evidence :-).
Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a good method for presenting and editing the kind of graphs we're talking about in a wiki.
No. I'd like to try doing some experiments though. We don't necessarily need "graphs". Tables and hierarchical lists may be a start, depending on what you're talking about.
Yes. The example Anthony posted today in another thread was useful:
---------------------------- snip ---------------------- Coastal_construction *Ports_and_harbours **Port_cities ***Edinburgh ****Education_in_Edinburgh [...] ---------------------------- snip ----------------------
article. An American movie may be "set in France", or a movie set in the US may be "shot in France". And people may be "born in France" or have "died in France".
Yeah, I know. But I would actually rather see a film article labelled "Films", "Made in France", "Made in US" rather than labelled "Films made in France", "Films made in the US".
Agreed. But the long-term goal should be for "Made in US" to be dynamically generated. It's just a bunch of relationships ("made in", "died in") and a list of attributes -- hierarchical even, in this case ("New York", "US", "North America"). You can have all kinds of fun with that, until someone adds a relationship like "was named after" and your software concludes that if people named after London are also named after Great Britain :-).
I guess the reason I am only mildly interested in hierarchies is that many interesting attributes (dead/alive, colors, professions) don't fit well into hierarchies. I think the real power comes from combining attributes.
Yep. But there's no software support for that atm.
But you have to deal with them anyway. Your suggested something like this:
women *real women *-living women *-dead women *fictional women
You _are_ using attributes here. So what if I'm looking for the biography of a female Polish chemist but don't know whether that woman is still alive? Do I have to check both categories, or do we maitain trees for every possible order of attributes (which is pretty much what we are doing right now, manually)?
What would actually be good would be being able to define categories in terms of attributes. Stick a {{Category:Polish chemists}} template on an article, which substitutes [[Attribute:Polish]] and [[Attribute:Chemists]], as well as containing a link to the category "Polish chemists". This category would be nothing more than a description and some sort of link to the two attributes, causing all articles with both attributes to be displayed.
Where's {{Category:Polish chemists}} coming from? Defined on a separate page? And do we also add {{Category:Female chemists}} and {{Category:Polish physicists}} and {{Category:Polish women}} to the same article?
Roger