Hi,
I do not understand what's wrong with the first [[Category:...]] approach.
Categories are kind of metadata - not all arguments against metadata apply on
them. Categories are not hidden as long as they result in a link on top of the
article or somewhere else - they are not more complicated than interlanguage
links (which are complicated in some way).
Seperating categorisation and articles in two projects does not make
categorisation more easy. In fact I'd also like to move articles and
categories around in a hierarchal view but the most common action is
to specify the category an article belongs to.
By the way categories are nothing but hierarchical links between articles.
Semantically there is no big difference between dividing an article in subtopics
and creating a category with a couple of articles in it.
Magnus wrote:
Example: "[[Category:Stuff]]" somewhere in
the article will show a link
above (similar to language links), leading to the category page
("Category:Stuff"). That will automagically list all pages in that
category (meaning, that link there via category link). A category page
can be edited like a normal page (the article list is automatically
shown below), and can include "super-categories" (e.g.,
"[[Category:Biology]]" on "Category:Zoology"). Any page can, of
course,
have many categories.
Ah - that´s the fault! The link [[Category:Stuff]] should refer to the
article "Stuff" and not to some special-category-only article.
[[Category:Biology]] *is* [[Biology]]! Please have a look at the actual
article [[en:Biology]]: What does ==Fields of study in biology== contain
but a listing of subtopics? Why introduce a new artificial namespace when you
can better name the article for instance "Fields of study in biology"?
The Cunctator wrote:
I could imagine a group at the MIT Media Lab or the Cyc project figuring
out some bad-ass way of navigating Wikipedia content, etc.
That's still possible with categories. There are a lot of automatic
posibilities
- most of them based on the links between articles. A special category-link
would give more input.
What I'd like to see is an explicit wiki-statement
of what is the
desired functionality--that is, what is the utility missing--that a
category scheme would provide.
Then we can discuss particular implementations separately--for example,
is it better to use a system which has a single ontology or a system
which allows for dynamic ontologies?
Argl! A wikiontology is a nice scientific project but nothing any
normal human beeing will ever able to edit.
Evan wrote:
What I propose it that MediaWiki expand this metadata
format to cover
other types of metadata, such as:
* categorization -- saying that particle physics is in the
physics category, or that Lord of the Rings is in the fantasy
books category
* relationships between articles -- break up a single page into
multiple chapters or sections, and note that they're all part
of the same article
categorization is just a kind of typed relationship. I could also imagine:
[[see:A]]
see-also-links that will automatically generate a backlink on article 'A'
[[next:A]]
ordering articles
But hierarchical link are the most important ones.
Greetings,
Jakob