[WikiEN-l] Categories (was: Hello)

[Steve Bennett]

On 12/14/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> It didn't evolve into an unfocused mess -- it started as an unfocused
> mess. As did Wikipedia. We don't necessarily need a small committee of
> experts to "fix" the "problems" of Wikipedia.
>
> One of the things that makes Wikipedia great is its flexibility.

My understanding is that most processes in WP start small and
unfocussed, spread out to become large and unfocussed, then are slowly
refine and are distilled to become small and focussed again. For
example, a policy document usually starts with some rant by an
individual. It expands as other individuals join in the ranting. Then
common sense starts to emerge. Finally, it can be reduced to a couple
of sentences that are actually helpful.

With categories, I think we've got to the "huge mess" stage, but I
don't see a lot of distillation or refining going on.

> > I would like to take the discussion back to my original question: May I
> > include both a main category and a subcategory in the same article? I would
> > like to accomplish this without creating an edit war with another editor who
> > thinks it¹s wrong.

On a practical level, it's obviously very useful to have both the cat
and supercat on an article sometimes. The prohibition on this
presupposes some mediawiki treatment of sub/supercats that just
doesn't exist.

Steve