On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 7:25 AM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
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.
[snip]
Because adding the parents produces non-sense results because "categorization" is a flawed concept except at the most fuzzy and course levels: Reality doesn't fit into neat nested boxes (not even the N-dimensional ones created by multiple parentage). The two primary problems are semantic drift (the further away you get from a relationship the more not-quite-matching error accumulates), and multiple link types (we use categories to describe different types of membership, and while within a type the membership relation is commutative among types it is usually not). So with parentages you get chains like [periodic table]->[hydrogen]->[hydrogen compounds]->[water]->[places with water]->[beaches]->[beaches in america]->[beaches of lalaville]->[lalavill beach]->[Image:Ironmeteor_at_lalavill_beach.jpg]
Is an iron meteor a "beach in america" or a "hydrogen compound"? No.
Offering all the parents with an easy checkbox interface that allows you quickly adopt all that apply would be great, but forcing their inclusion would produce rubbish.