Thank you, Steve, for making (painful) sense out of this issue for me. I started school with a typewriter and finished post-grad with pretty much the same. The only computer on campus was the size of my dorm.
I'll continue to campaign for changes; although as technochallenged as I am, my arguments will need to remain philosophical.
Marc
From: Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:26:57 -0500 To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Categories (was: Hello)
I wrote:
My own take on the question is that Categories in their current form are an imprecise mechanism, and that people should not try to use them for precise tasks, or waste too much time arguing about particular attempted more-precise usages.
By which I mean, the argument usually boils down to trying to decide precisely whether category membership is supposed to denote an "is-a", "has-a" or "is-related-to" relationship. But that can't be answered, so the arguments can never really be resolved, and people have to fall back to using categories not to implement rigid OO-like inheritable hierarchies, but rather, looser collections where the only semantic attached to category membership is "is-kinda-related-to". Some categories and the editors who maintain them will reach some kind of loose, relatively informal consensus that they're categories which embody a web of loose relationships (e.g. "Topics relating to Paris"), and some will similarly reach some kind of loose, relatively informal consensus that they're categories which embody a tighter taxonomy (e.g. "Counties in California").
Now, despite what I said about the problem not being solveable without additional and potentially more-complicated technical mechanisms which aren't likely to happen soon, it seems to me that one loose, relatively informal, "soft" solution to the part of the problem would be to try to reflect a category's semantic in its name, e.g. "Category:Counties in California" and "Category:Arrondissements in Paris" and "Category:Topics relating to Paris", rather than just "Category:California" and "Category:Paris". And we're probably doing a lot of that today. But there are still (and will always be) lots of problems when categories contain other categories, and we'll always be wondering whether category membership is or isn't or should or shouldn't be transitive, and it's these larger-scale questions which we can't (under the current architecture) ever fully satisfactorily resolve.
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