Hi,
Perhaps i expect to much of categories but I still do not see the difference
between categories and other articles.
Evan Prodromou wrote:
From a graphical level, part-whole implies a tree
structure
This is only true for one type of part-whole-relationship. There is
Part-of-Time, Part-of-Space, Part-of-Belonging etc. With all this
posibilities you end up in a multiple hierarchy.
OK. I took "dividing an article into
subtopics" as "dividing an
article into parts". I think there's ways that "subtopics" could be
parts, and ways that "subtopics" could be members of a category.
No way. The difference between Part-whole-relationship and
instance-of-relationship is too slightly to bee recognized by a large community
in
the same way. In a short article about Northern Ireland there could be a chapter
about National parks of Northern Ireland (part-of). Somebody moves it into an
article of it's own. In short time there will be more than one parent of this
article (Irleand, National Parks, Conservation in the United Kingdom...).
Erik wrote:
Category pages are not articles. Like talk pages and
meta pages, they
should be logically separated from articles, which has numerous benefits
(easier searching/filtering, counting etc.)
If you mean articles containing *only* a list of other articles that are
categorized under the same topic you are right. But there are a lot of real
articles that *also* contain lists of subtopics. A quick example:
In [[en:Statistics]] there is a the following part "Some sciences use applied
statistics so extensively that they have specialized terminology. These
disciplines include:" and a list containing "Biostatistics, Business
statistics,
Economic statistics, Engineering statistics, Population statistics,
Psychological statistics, Social statistics, Process analysis, Chemometrics".
I think most people would categorize these articles in [[category=Statistics]]
or [[category=Applied statistics]]. With your approach we´ll have
1.) an automatically generated page [[category:Statistics]] and
2.) the manually generated list in the article [[Statistics]]
That does not seem very smart. By the way an article can be categorized
in multiple topics so there may be multiple manually generated lists in
different articles that are only connected via normal links and some
category-pages.
If category-pages should get a different namespace like the Talk-pages there
will be a automatically generated category-page for each article. In most cases
It will be empty or small. There should be a way to include it's content in the
article for instance with something like {{MySubtopics}}
Greetings
Jakob