--- Robert Bihlmeyer robbe+wiki@orcus.priv.at wrote: [snip]
- Why is this scheme better than Magnus's (noting on
a page itself that it belongs to categories X, Y,
Z)?
Almost no good category list is just a random jumble of links.
I both agree and disagree. An organized collection of links can be useful. But an alphabetical list of articles in the category can still be quite useful.
I know it might sound like a bit of an overkill, but we could have both -- we could have organized and unorganized category pages, the unorganized ones automatically generated, the organized ones made by hand. Since we'd only have to maintain one (the organized one), its really no more work than we have at the moment.
I think generating category pages to display to the user is only one use for categories -- there are uses for software-understood categories as well, like siome of the uses I and Larry have mentioned in our respective posts. So a categorisation that doesn't automatically feed into the category page might still be useful.
For example [[Prime ministers of Great Britain]] should probably be sorted in chronological order.
Ideally, I'd like to have the software understand objects like "Incumbent", with little fields of data like "Office, Name, Start Date, End Date"... That way we could produce little databases of office holders, etc... They could be used to generate a category, sorted whichever way you wish. And, since they'd be databases, the information in them would be easily available to dumb software (exactly what you'd do with it though, I don't know.) I've been thinking about doing this, although its not really a priority at the moment.
"Proper" categories like [[Computer science]] are best represented by dividing the listing into subfields (as done in the current page).
Well, my suggestion was that they would be subcategories, or independent categories in their own life... so an algorithm could go in the category [[Computer Science/Algorithms]], or alternatively in both the [[Computer Science]] category and the [[Algorithms]] category. Using a modification of Magnus' proposal you could display the contents of multiple categories on the one page.
Magnus's scheme could support this via more complicated syntax (e.g. {{{CATEGORY P.M. of Great Britain;1985}}}, or {{{CATEGORY Computer science;Algorithms}}}), but
that
reeks a bit of overengineering.
I think in the case of Algorithms, it makes sense. Most category systems permit subcategories, so why not have a "Computer Science/Algorithms" category?
As to the P.M, well, I agree with you that seems a bit overengineered.
Plus writers would have to coordinate their efforts (choose the same subcategorisation, and/or sort order) -- coordination is easier done on a single page (the category) than across a number of pages.
I don't envision the primary responsibility for categorisation necessarily being with the writer of the page. Writing articles, and categorising them, are different tasks, and don't need to be done by the same people. (One is like an author, the other like a librarian.)
So the promise of "just editing one page instead of two or more" is a fallacy IMO. Even with the extended synatx above, you'd first have to check out the category page(s) to see the existing layout before you could sensibly write the correct category link(s).
Well, it depends on how well you know the category, and how it is organized. If you are thinking of just assigning things to major categories, like "Physics", or "Philosophy" and "History", and we are in the process of assigning 20,000 articles to these major categories, then just being able to click "Edit this page", add "{{CATEGORY}}}" and save is a lot simpler.
Simon J Kissane
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