[Commons-l] Fwd: "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:
> On 1/29/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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)
>
> I thought I provided some pretty clear examples of why flattening is no good.
> Is there a reason you ignored that point?
> :)

It works poorly if you expand all the way, and the higher up in the
tree you start, the worse it works. In my experience using
Duesentrieb's tool, it works quite well when you specify a low depth
(depth=1,2,3). Often 1 is appropriate.

As is obvious to anyone who works with categories on a regular basis,
several types of relationships are encoded in category relations (3
examples: is type of, is component of, is related to).

Simply using broad categories instead of narrow ones, as you suggest,
will not stop  unexpected results because not every category link is a
"is type of" which is what is needed for it to work.

some examples.
[[category:Hominidae]] is type of [[category:primates]] (I think all
TOL stuff would be like this)
[[category:wheels]] is component of [[category:automobiles]]
[[category:Culture, People, Geography, States, etc of Country X]] is
related to [[Category:Country X]].

I don't think you are suggesting we should stop including links like
these are you?

insert blah blah Semantic MediaWiki blah blah... until there is
something extra available to us to distinguish between itypeof and
isrelatedto category links, and the rest of them, the tree will ALWAYS
be "broken". That doesn't mean it's not useful in its current status
though. Ways to improve it are always welcome. But I am not certain
this will be one of them.

cheers
Brianna