On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 7:12 PM, Daniel Schwen lists@schwen.de wrote:
Uhm, yeah.. except that intersection of atomic categories are not vaporware. We had proofs of concept for that and the interest was marginal.
Vaporware with proofs of concept is still vaporware. The definition of vaporware is more or less something that doesn't go *beyond* proofs of concept. Category intersection has never been added to the software and there's no timetable for adding it to the software, so doing any recategorization right *now* to aid category intersection would be pointless. JS thingies may have been enabled on some wikis for some time periods, but that's very different from a feature being prominently added to *all* wikis.
On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 8:16 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
With a JS hack I had my tool integrated to the site. The AJAX calls went to the toolserver, but as far as the users could see it was running on the site. No one cared: It didn't produce useful results because of how categories are used, and when I suggested changing people just waved their arms at me "just make it walk the tree".
What was the interface like (how noticeable/obtrusive), how long was it up, and why did it get removed? You're certainly going to need a critical mass of people who know about it and use it before there will be any effect. And enabling it on all wikis at once would likely help, too: if Germans get used to using it on dewiki and find it useful, they'll be more likely to push for it to be made useful on Commons.
On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 7:45 AM, Tim Landscheidt tim@tim-landscheidt.de wrote:
Add to that the maintenance costs because you would want to ensure that if someone who is not aware of the concept of atomic categories adds a [[Category:Manhattan]] to something he adds [[Category:New York]], [[Category:East Coast of the United States]], [[Category:United States]] and the other gigazillion umbrella categories as well so searches for a building in a country bordering a water body will still show results.
A reasonable point. In the medium term it could be handled by (you guessed it) bots. In the longer term, allowing people to define more concrete semantic relationships between categories (e.g., "X is partitioned into X1, X2, ..., Xn") could make this automatic within the software itself.
In the end, all of these objections are really irrelevant to the technical issues here. The fact of the matter is that category intersection is widely supported in other major software products (in the form of tag intersection), it's something that a lot of people want, and so it would be good if it were in the core software. How fully various specific communities would want to use it is up to them -- that some communities might never choose to use a particular feature doesn't mean that it shouldn't be developed (cf. FlaggedRevs, etc.).