Stan Shebs wrote:
there are a couple of different approaches. One is to
create categories for every conjunction of categories - if you have
"hotels" and "museums" and "Ohio", that means you should
have "hotels
in Ohio" and "museums in Ohio" categories.
I favour this approach. Without it, [[Category:Museums]] would contain
*all* museums in the world (millions!), and [[Category:Ohio]] would
contain absolutely *everything* about Ohio (cities, museums,
exhibitions, operas, theatres, cinemas, railways, bus lines,
sightseeing, TV stations, and all sorts of other unrelated things).
The other approach is to
have an article in multiple categories and do nothing else, but then
the software currently gives you no easy way to list only the museums
in Ohio.
And even if it did, my above comment still stands -- I think the only
articles [[Category:Museum]] should directly contain are those that
don't fit in any of its sub-categories (e.g. [[museum]]).
I personally tend to favor the second approach,
because the
conjunction categories will combinatorially explode and eventually
outnumber articles.
How did you come to this conclusion? With the conjunction categories,
the vast majority of articles will be in only one category. But even if
your calculation was plausible, what's wrong with having loads of
categories (which are just a bit of meta stuff) and a slightly smaller
number of articles (all of which, however, will be loaded with useful
information)?
It seems more useful to add a way for the category
page to optionally group members by a second category or some such, so
you can go to the museums category and say "organize by location
categories" and have it sort and group by country/state/city.
Any scheme like that will always be limited in an annoying way. Imagine
the particular location you want isn't in it. It would take developer
effort to add it. Or imagine you want to combine two things, both of
which aren't a location.
In any case, I think category creation will settle
down once there
are about as many categories as there are lists now.
Has there been an edit war about categories yet, at all? It seems that a
lot of people are grumpy that categorisations of particular articles get
changed multiple times, but as I said before, I don't see anything wrong
with that, especially when it settles down to something that nobody
insists on reverting.
Timwi