[WikiEN-l] Re: Re: What is a category?

[Bill Konrad]

"Chris Wood" <standsongrace at hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:ch65tl$ose$1 at sea.gmane.org...
> What I'm arguing is, "is-a" is not going to work, it's too POV. What we 
> have
> now is sets of related articles, which is all we need (is-a relationships
> *can* be represented this way, but are more flexible).


Is-a relations work just fine for noncontroversial categories. Quartz is a 
type of mineral. Bill Clinton is (was) a U.S. President. Arnold 
Schwartzennegger is a governor of California. Canada is a country in North 
America. Then there are some areas that are a little more controversial, due 
to judgements about the classification system used: should a particular 
author be included in the category Fantasy writers, Science fiction writers, 
or Horror writers, or all three? But I think most such questions could be 
decided relatively amicably. (I realize that there are problems even with 
such simple classes as well--e.g., the discussions about which counties 
should be included in the Europe template--the line dividing Europe and Asia 
is not self-evident at all points).

Where is gets much more difficult is where there are intense POV values 
built into the categorization (especially where the defining criteria depend 
on subjective determinations). Such as whether something is a work of 
propaganda. Or whether a person is an alcoholic. Or if an incident was an 
act of terrorism or of patriotism.

But I do not see how your distinction between related-to and is-a makes any 
difference in such situations. I think the difficulties of NPOV 
categorization are not that different from that of NPOV language in an 
article in general. The language used to describe a person/thing/event 
inevitably carries some subjective value judgements about the topic. The 
criticism you make of categorization seems to be a variaton on a critique of 
language in general. In your earlier post, you

I guess I simply do not understand how related-to is any better than or so 
very different from is-a categorization. If you are suggesting that we 
should have a very flat category structure with many more categories for 
each article, then I very strongly disagree. Hierachichical categorization 
is useful, despite the inherent difficulties with any categorization schema. 
I do not see any significant attempts to make categorization in Wikipedia is 
an endorsement of any single ontological worldview--there are mutliple 
competing/complementary hierarchies. I think your assertion (in your earlier 
post) that "Sets are much less POV" is simply wrong. A set is just as POV as 
a hierarchy. Whether there is a list/set of alcoholics or of propaganda or 
of acts of terrorism--inclusion in such a list/set is expressing a POV just 
as much as if including within a hierarchical categorization schema.

Bkonrad