On 12/12/06, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
Unfortunately, it would not. At least, not completely. Categorization is not transitive: if article A is a member of category C, and C is a subcat of D, A need not be a member of D. For example: [[Seine]] is in [[Category:Paris]], which is in [[Category:Cities in France]], which is in [[Category:France]], which is in [[Category:Republics]], which ultimately is a subcat of [[Category:Thought]].
But the Seine is not a thought, a republic, or a city in France.
Categories as implemented now have mixed meanings: they can describe "is-a", "has-a" or "is-related-to" connections. See earlier discussions on this list in September 2004 and June 2006 (http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/htdig/wikien-l/2006-June/048183.html).
Eugene
This is a real problem, which an extension, semantic mediawiki, (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki) was made to solve. It's definitely worth taking a look at for situations like this. It allows you to do things like say, "Paris is a [[type:=city]] in [[located in::France]], with a population of [[population:=1,000,000,000]]. You can then do fun things like say, show me all the cities with populations over 20 etc.
For this original example, Fred is a [[profession::writer]] who committed [[type of death::suicide]]. [[Category:People]] etc. You could then query all the writers who's type of death was suicide without having to have one million categories for every possible union. I hope one day we can (maybe cross your fingers) use some of this on the main wikipedia. It's usefulness as a replacement for a lot of categories is one of the biggest benefits.
Judson [[:en:User:Cohesion]]