David Gerard wrote:
2008/12/4 Tim Landscheidt:
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.
Which is why we have zillions of obsessive nerdy humans writing the encyclopedia. Tags are fine, there's nothing wrong intrinsically with hundreds of tags where appropriate and useful. I suppose presentation in Monobook will be interesting ...
- d.
If we're going to end up with hundreds of categories on each page, why not make the software automatically add all parent categories? It would fill the categorylinks table*, but it would as well by manually adding them. It would also require forcing the categories to be a graph and maybe limiting the number of parent categories, as to reduce a bit how expensive category position changes can be. But, if we leave that to 'manual actions', the same actions would be performed by bots, leading to the same cost and partially less coherent structure.
*Add a expandedcategorylinks table? Probably also add a 'don't inherit' flag on categary table which can be appplied to high level categories such as 'All licenses' or 'Commons root'.