[Commons-l] "Did you know?" ... The family tree of [[Category:Copyright statuses]] and our broken category system.

[Brianna Laugher]

On 30/01/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Unless I find huge opposition here, I'm going to begin changing the
> commons instruction pages to reflect this use of categories rather
> than our historic use.

Hold up just a tiny bit. You are not paying attention to the reason
that narrow categories developed in the first place. It's because the
support for working with categories is incredibly poor. Categories
with over 200 items find half their subcats go missing (from the first
page) because subcat paging is not separate to article(/media)
paging.(bug 1211)

Narrow categories developed because there was no means to perform
category intersections. They are manual category intersections. I
wouldn't suggest changing that at least until this category
intersection thing is implemented and we can see its utility.

Secondly, is this category intersection thing really not going to
include an option to automatically search subcats as well? (a la
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~daniel/WikiSense/CategoryIntersect.php?&wikilang=en&wikifam=commons.wikimedia.org
see "depth=3") That seems like a pretty vital basic functionality that
will be needed, even if we switch to using broad cats.

Thirdly, your proposal is going to massively increase the average
number of categories for each file. (Although they will typically have
shorter names.) How far "up" the tree do you propose it will be
reasonable to go? For a portrait of a woman, we should put
[[category:women]]
[[category:homo]]
[[category:Hominidae]]
[[category:primates]]
[[category:Mammalia]]
[[Category:Vertebrata]]
[[Category:Chordata]]
[[Category:Animalia]]
[[Category:Eukaryota]]
?
They're all true, are they not?

Instead of doing that, I think it would be more sensible to continue
the tradition of only putting the most specific cat that applies, and
adjusting the software to have an option to display subcategory items
into the current category (like "flatten" I think) when desired. (bug
2725)

regards
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise