[WikiEN-l] Re: A first encounter with Categories
Bryan Derksen
bryan.derksen at shaw.ca
Tue Jun 8 02:55:06 UTC 2004
At 03:22 AM 6/8/2004 +0200, Anthere wrote:
>[[list of museums in Australia with a chinese flag hanging above the
>entrance door]] is of no use.
>
>Search "[[museum]]" where "[[country]] is 'australia'" and "[[topic]] is
>'China'" is useful.
>
>To be useful, meta-tags must be large rather than very specific. Query
>gives the specificity.
But thanks to subcategorization, they can be _both_. [[Museums in ohio]]
can be a subcategory of [[Museums]] along with all the other [[Museums in
<location>]] subcategories, and then all you need to do is throw in a
mechanism for referring to all the articles in a category tree and you can
treat [[Museums]] as if it contained all museum articles everywhere. If
you're already proposing a query language for manipulating categories this
seems a fairly trivial extension to it to me.
I've been wavering a bit, but I think I'm coming down pretty solidly in the
fine-grained categorization camp. The other day I was working on moving the
articles in the [[North American Rivers]] category to the [[North American
rivers]] category (note capitalization), and started putting the articles
into [[Idaho rivers]], [[Alberta rivers]], etc subcategories instead
because the list was so big and generic otherwise. I then found it
trivially easy to stick those subcategories under the relevant geographic
categories as well ([[Idaho]], [[Alberta]]), and it occurred to me that it
would be fairly easy once I was done to set up [[Mississippi watershed]],
[[Colorado watershed]], etc. since in many cases whole entire states drain
into those and I could just drop their subcategories in place to include
all of their rivers. It would be a whole lot more work if I had to go
around to each of those articles and add a new category to every river in
North America.
IMO, fine-grained categories provide a convenient "handle" by which groups
of articles can be organized in various useful ways, without requiring
editors to learn how to deal with query languages doing complicated or
mysterious stuff "behind the scenes" or adding lots of high-level category
tags to individual articles.
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