[WikiEN-l] Types of categories

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 6/3/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> On Sat, 03 Jun 2006 19:54:27 +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> > I'm probably not the only one who envisages all the wonderful things
> > that could be done with this massive collection of information that is
> > Wikipedia, *if only* we could do something clever with the categories.
> > And then you realise that you can't really do anything clever because
> > "category" has all sorts of different meanings to different people.
>
> Agreed. Still: can you give some specific examples of wonderful things that
> could be done but are not possible now? That would tell us what problem you
> are trying to solve.
>
I've personally run into this when trying to automatically create, for
example, a list of all Wikipedia articles on people.  You can't just
start at [[category:people]] and work your way down, because you wind
up going to [[Category:Women]] (fine, all women are people) then
[[Category:Feminine hygene]] (bad).

> Categories based on such intersections of attributes are conceptually bad.
> Look at the categories for an article like [[Marie Curie]]: She's French
> three times, female four times, Polish four times (not counting "Natives of
> Warsaw"), etc. Why not create [[Category:Polish women who were born in
> 1867 and died in 1934 and won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry and in Physics]]?
>
Because there would only be one person in that category.

> If we don't have a term for (or an article about) it, there probably
> shouldn't be a category for it, either (I'm sure a determined mind could
> come up with an exception).
>
If the category system could effectively build these intersection
categories on the fly, I'd agree.  But the category system can't
currently do that.  (And it's been around a reasonably long time, with
that as an obvious flaw, and no one has fixed it.)

> > Attributes: The category exists to denote some very specific small
> > detail of a subject, such that it would be conceivable to have dozens
> > or more such categories on an article. Examples: 1943 deaths, Living
> > persons, Winners of Nobel Peace Prize, etc. These tend to hierarchies
> > that start strict then end up fuzzy. Eg, 1943 deaths is only in 1943
> > and "1940s deaths", and these have parent categories of
> > "1940s","Years" and so forth, eventually ending up in "History",
> > whereupon things become chaos.
>
> There is no way to make hierarchies not suck, especially if you have to
> maintain them manually (as we do now). Don't try to impose hierarchies
> unless they emerge quite naturally from the subject.
>
I made a proposal.  All subcategories of attributes must be a subset
of the parent attribute.  Seems like a perfectly reasonable way to
make hierarchies not suck.

Anthony