[WikiEN-l] Types of categories

[Alphax (Wikipedia email)]

Roger Luethi 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.
> 
>> So far I have identified four rough types of categories. I'll invent
>> the notion a(X) to mean that article X is in category a. a(b(X)) means
>> that a is a subcategory of b, and X is in b.
> 
> ITYM "b is a subcategory of a".
> 
>> Taxonomies: Tend to end in "s" and satisfy the rule that "If a(X) then
>> X is an a") is a logical sentence. Tend to form strict hierarchies,
>> where if a(X) and b(a), then it's perfectly natural and normal that
>> b(a(X)). Eg, Bridges in France is a subcat of Bridges, and every entry
>> in "bridges in France" is definitely a Bridge.  It's rare for an
>> article to be in more than two taxonomic categories at once.
> 
> "Bridges in France" may not be the best example. "Bridges in France" is
> just an intersection of two attributes ("in France", "Bridges"), and their
> relative position in a hierarchy is undefined. Hence more than one
> hierarchy: You can drill down "France" ... "Buildings and structurces in
> France" or "Bridges" ...  "Bridges by country".
<snip>

There are a few proposals on how to do this; most of them are in the
"See also" section of
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Category_math_feature>,
specifically CatScan
<http://tools.wikimedia.de/~daniel/WikiSense/CategoryIntersect.php> and
the MediaWiki extension DynamicPageList
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/DynamicPageList>; an extended version,
DPL2, is described at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/DynamicPageList2>.

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