[WikiEN-l] Types of categories

[Steve Bennett]

On 6/6/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> First we need to find out which rules make sense and then make a convincing
> case: Demonstrate the benefits, have answers to apparent drawbacks, a
> realistic migration path. Compare the problems solved to the problems left.

Ok. I suspect rules like "Express X by doing Y and Z" are going to
work better than "Don't do X".

> If we ever got that far, there should be a sandbox that challenges people
> to add problem and corner cases. New rules have little credibility unless
> you can demonstrate that you don't have to rethink parts of your system
> every time a new example comes up.

Would it be credible to say that for 90% of the time the new system is
better, and for the other 10% we leave it the way it is?

> Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a good method for presenting and editing
> the kind of graphs we're talking about in a wiki.

No. I'd like to try doing some experiments though. We don't
necessarily need "graphs". Tables and hierarchical lists may be a
start, depending on what you're talking about.

> Ah, here I agree. So we have attributes for state (dead/alive). You
> probably want them for location, too. Being able to slap "in France" on an
> article would be helpful. Problem is, not everything is a bridge where "in
> <location>" has an unambiguous meaning in relation to the subject of the
> article. An American movie may be "set in France", or a movie set in the US
> may be "shot in France". And people may be "born in France" or have "died
> in France".

Yeah, I know. But I would actually rather see a film article labelled
"Films", "Made in France", "Made in US" rather than labelled "Films
made in France", "Films made in the US".

> I guess the reason I am only mildly interested in hierarchies is that many
> interesting attributes (dead/alive, colors, professions) don't fit well
> into hierarchies. I think the real power comes from combining attributes.

Yep. But there's no software support for that atm.

> The German WP is much closer to that. For instance, they don't have
> categories like "Polish Chemists". They only have the attribute categories
> "Polish" and "Chemist". From a practical point of view, that's less usable
> than what we have (they basically need to use CatScan which is fairly
> limited, and casual users don't know about it anyway). But it's
> conceptually cleaner, and they are in a better position for making
> interesting experiments.

What would actually be good would be being able to define categories
in terms of attributes. Stick a {{Category:Polish chemists}} template
on an article, which substitutes [[Attribute:Polish]] and
[[Attribute:Chemists]], as well as containing a link to the category
"Polish chemists". This category would be nothing more than a
description and some sort of link to the two attributes, causing all
articles with both attributes to be displayed.

IMHO it would not be a huge amount of work to implement, could be
phased in gradually, and would be a huge improvement.

Steve