On 6/5/06, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Way back in the mists of history when categories were first implemented I created a couple of templates intended to be put onto the category pages to identify whether the category contained articles that were examples of the category's subject or articles that were just _about_ the category's subject. There seemed to be no interest in using them and I didn't think it important enough to raise a fuss about, so I figured I'd just sit back and watch how categorization actually got used rather than trying to impose my vision on it.
Perhaps it'd be useful to recreate similar templates now, though, if enough people think it's a problem? That way there'd be no major disruption to the category tree, but people who wanted to do fancy culling of subsets of articles could add just a little parsing intelligence to whatever program they're using to determine what types of categories they're dealing with.
This does sound like a good start, but will need some intelligence in its application. One of the problems is that good categorisation is somewhat challenging, and the "average person" won't necessarily make good use of these templates. In fact the same could probably be said for all semantic markup, of which this is an example.
Do you have any examples? What would they look like? Perhaps:
{{thematic category|name of subject}} --> This category should be applied to all articles which have a strong link with <name of subject> and
{{taxonomic category|type of thing|thematic category}} --> This category should be applied to articles which are an example of a <type of thing>, and which do not belong to a subcategory. Articles which are just related to this topic should go in [[:Category:<Thematic category>]] instead.
Anyone want to mock one up?
Steve