[WikiEN-l] Subcategories

[Steve Bennett]

On 4/4/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't supposed you've seen the wonders that can be achieved with
> http://tools.wikimedia.de/~daniel/WikiSense/CategoryIntersect.php by any
> chance?

I have. It is wonderful. But it's not integrated into MediaWiki.
Perhaps all I really want is that if you add some subcategory to an
article, all the parent categories are added automatically (perhaps in
smaller text or something).

Or perhaps I want a really tight definition of "subcategory", which
doesn't seem to exist. There are at least two distinct meanings (and
uses) of the relationship A = subcategory(B) (fictitious examples)

- Definitive subcategories. Every item that could be tagged B could by
definition be tagged A. For example, famous German artists/famous
Germans
- Fuzzy subsets: B itself is a kind of subdomain of A. e.g. Opera is a
subdomain of Singing, but "Sydney Opera House" is not a kind of
singing (but could well be categorised "Opera")

The problem may be that categories sometimes mean "is a" and sometimes
mean "is related to". This is weakly hinted at in the category
guidelines, which distinguish between "Operas" as an "is a" category,
and "Opera" as a "related to" category. Intriguingly, "Operas" has
three subcategories, subcategories of which are used to tag actual
operas several times. For example, Don Giovanni falls into Italian
Operas, Operas by Mozart, and Operas, as well as the "related to"
category Melodrama). And this is a *well-organised* categorisation
system.

Lastly, for some comic relief, check out the categories on this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brokeback_Mountain

Can you work out which categories are misapplied? :)

Steve