On 4/10/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
So if I tell Wikipedia to show me all the articles about wood, would it also show me the "tree" articles that an editor forgot to also explicitly add the "wood" tag too? If I tag an article "treee" there won't be a redlink to warn me I've accidentally created an orphan tag? Would an article about a school need to be tagged with city, county, state, country and continent tags independantly, and will all of these tags be displayed in a big lump on the article's page?
These questions are all implementation specific. No one has proposed a specific implementation of tags in MediaWiki as opposed to categories. The semantic distinction between a tag ("a word that is relevant to some entity") and a category ("a specific class of entities of which this subject is one example") is more important.
I really like the way categories currently work, and I suspect that to get them into this state project-wide it would take more than just a handful of obsessive loons. What I think would be a great addition to categories would be a way to specify explicitly whether a subcategory is meant to be a collection of the same things as fit in the supercategory or if it's just related in a more generic way (eg, [[cat:cities in California]] is a collection of things that also belong in [[cat:cities in the United States]], but the things in [[cat:San Francisco]] do not themselves belong in [[cat:cities in California]]). If this were possible on a software level then an auto-aggregating function would be much less likely to get confused.
Yes, I have been arguing for such a distinction for quite a while, but I don't have a vision for exactly what it would look like. We analysed different kinds of categories in some depth maybe 6 months ago, but there were little grey areas everywhere. Maybe instead of trying to solve all the problems of categories in one hit, we do just need a simple tag which says "It is ok to treat this category as a strict taxonomy", so that all members of all subcategories have equal weight in it.
But you would probably still have problems with members that didn't strictly belong, like the "main article" for each category.
Anyone want to request a specific feature, like a __INCLUDESUBCATS__ tag for categories?
Steve