Stan Shebs wrote:
there are a couple of different approaches. One is to create categories for every conjunction of categories - if you have "hotels" and "museums" and "Ohio", that means you should have "hotels in Ohio" and "museums in Ohio" categories.
I favour this approach. Without it, [[Category:Museums]] would contain *all* museums in the world (millions!), and [[Category:Ohio]] would contain absolutely *everything* about Ohio (cities, museums, exhibitions, operas, theatres, cinemas, railways, bus lines, sightseeing, TV stations, and all sorts of other unrelated things).
The other approach is to have an article in multiple categories and do nothing else, but then the software currently gives you no easy way to list only the museums in Ohio.
And even if it did, my above comment still stands -- I think the only articles [[Category:Museum]] should directly contain are those that don't fit in any of its sub-categories (e.g. [[museum]]).
I personally tend to favor the second approach, because the conjunction categories will combinatorially explode and eventually outnumber articles.
How did you come to this conclusion? With the conjunction categories, the vast majority of articles will be in only one category. But even if your calculation was plausible, what's wrong with having loads of categories (which are just a bit of meta stuff) and a slightly smaller number of articles (all of which, however, will be loaded with useful information)?
It seems more useful to add a way for the category page to optionally group members by a second category or some such, so you can go to the museums category and say "organize by location categories" and have it sort and group by country/state/city.
Any scheme like that will always be limited in an annoying way. Imagine the particular location you want isn't in it. It would take developer effort to add it. Or imagine you want to combine two things, both of which aren't a location.
In any case, I think category creation will settle down once there are about as many categories as there are lists now.
Has there been an edit war about categories yet, at all? It seems that a lot of people are grumpy that categorisations of particular articles get changed multiple times, but as I said before, I don't see anything wrong with that, especially when it settles down to something that nobody insists on reverting.
Timwi