Magnus Manske wrote:
The Cunctator wrote:
Please, please do not turn on this feature. Human-inserted metadata is basically unwiki. There are better approaches to dealing with the problem of categorization/computer comprehension of data. The right approaches act like magic.
Would be great to have one of those. But, AFAIK, there's no way to implement a category scheme purely by code. That mean, there *has* to be some interface for humans changing categories around. That can be either some "Add/remove/change category" construct on every page; ugly, and a bitch to write, as one would have to re-implement "old version", delete/undelete, and the like *for the category system alone*. OTOH, we can use the way of language links; while I'd prefer a centralized language link facility (one for all wikipedias), it could work better for the category scheme, as that information stays within that 'pedia.
And since when is editing an article unwiki? :-)
Moreover, this isn't really (only) a discussion for wikitech-l.
The original question was a technical one, IIRC. I also vaguely remember support for that category scheme when I had it running at the test site.
But if we need Yet Another Discussion (TM) on wikipoedia-l about the nature of the category system (I *know* we kinda decided to use one!), so be it.
I agree that there seemed to be much support fro some kind of category scheme. It's hard to see it as anything other than human inserted; the alternative of leaving it to some bot horrifies me. I still think that some kind of category box that would leave room for any number of categories would be superior; these could have a comma or other appropriate delimiter. It seems more user friendly if the user does not have to learn more mark-up and can simply type in the category that he wants.
If we're speaking of something being more wiki we should not prejudge what the categories themselves would be, but let them evolve naturally. Some types of categories may be obvious, but we have a lot of imaginative participants out there in Wikiland. Some will be just plain strange, but they are worth trying. If they are not used by others they can be removed at a much later time.
A categorization scheme could be especially welcome at Wiktionary where there has been a trend to give a long list of translations for any given word. A number of cross indexes have been devised which in principle would be useful if anybody bothered to keep them up to date. It is not enough to give the Finnish or Guaraní word for "dog"; the cross-indexes for those languages need to be adjusted as well. That's what hasn't happened. I'm also looking at what might evolve at Wikisource, and perhaps Wikibooks.
Ec