[WikiEN-l] Types of categories

[Steve Bennett]

On 6/6/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> With the current software, that could be implemented as:
>
> [[Paris]]
>        [[Category:is a city]]
>                [[Category:is a (is there a name for "city or town or
>                        village or some other place"?)]]
>        [[Category:in France]] (or [[Category:located in France]])
>                [[Category:in Europe]]
>
> Okay.

Why do I get the feeling the current structure probably already looks
a lot like that, but with different names?

> What i see is (I added more information for illustration):
>
> [[Britney Spears]]
>        [[Category:is a singer]]
>                [[Category:is an entertainer]]
>                        [[Category:is a person]]
>        [[Category:is a child actor]]
>                [[Category:is an entertainer]]
>                        [[Category:is a person]]
>        [[Category:is alive]]
>        [[Category:is female]]
>        [[Category:born 1981]]
>        [[Category:born in McComb, Mississippi]] (that kind of category
>                        would be hard to maintain manually)

Good, good - why is that cat hard to maintain manually?

> Here are some other fun (existing!) categories from said article:
>
> Worst Actress Razzie: "won a Worst Actress Razzi"
> Soubrettes: "is a soubrette", I guess!?
> American child actors: ...? "is a child actor" or "was a child actor?"

Yes. The fact taht these are hard to express clearly is very telling.

> Hollywood Walk of Fame: Ugh.
> High school dropouts: Ahm?

Dropped out of high school?

> [[Pont du Gard]]
>        [[Category:is an aqueduct]]
>                [[Category:is a bridge]]
>                        [[Category:is a construction]]
>        [[Category:in France]]
>        [[Category:built by Romans]] (?)

Yep, why not. (Built by Ancient Romans if you prefer...)

> > Basically what I'm proposing now is keeping taxonomies quite strict,
> > and allowing greater flexibility in attributes. So we'll always know
> > whether an item is a soccer team or a city, but we may lose
> > information on the finer details if the attributes aren't managed
>
> Examples?

Erm, I mean, people will probably end up being "casual" with
attributes...but if we could make the taxonomic classificatins a bit
more firm...not sure what I'm getting at (it's late).

> > I don't quite understnd your second example. "Rattus rattus" "is a"
> > "Rattus" is ok isn't it?
>
> It is. But "species" is not a genus. Like city is not a country.

Yes, but I'm not sure what you're point is - are you talking about
"species" the article? Of course it shouldn't belong to "genus" the
category...probably missing something.

> I see two major problems with the status quo:
> * multi-concept categories (American child actors) force us to maintain a
>  complex system of subcategories (but they paper over shortcoming in the
>  software). The German WP shows it doesn't have to be this way, but
>  it might be difficult to convince people on WP:en until Mediawiki can
>  create intersections

Yay, how hard can it be?

> * categories with unclear relations that are used for everything

Like [[Category:Lasers]]? ;)

> We can fix both problems without changes to the software (but it still
> comes at a cost). However, we are dangerously close to inventing a poor
> man's version of a semantic wiki.

Would a fully fledged semantic wiki ever work on Wikipedia scale?

> My impression is that the German WP is pretty close to that. But categories
> are also an important navigation aid, and that's where WP:de falls short.

Trust the Germans to be organised! Obviously the shortcoming is the
lack of intersections though. You know, what would be really awesome
would be seeing at the bottom of each article:

Categories: Bridges, in France, built by Romans
See other: Bridges in France (200 articles), Bridges built by Romans
(137 articles), Bridges in France built by Romans (15 articles).

Is that feasible?

> > > Where's {{Category:Polish chemists}} coming from? Defined on a separate
> >
> > Defined on a separate page by someone who thought it was a meaningful
> > and useful category, and worth spending 2 minutes making.
>
> Number of countries: > 200
> Occupations: hundreds
>
> Not every country has people in every occupation, but these are just two
> attributes. That's many times 2 minutes. We should not have to do this
> manually.

Ok, I think we got sidetracked. I was saying you could put the
relevant attributes directly on a page, and manually search for the
appropriate intersection. However, people could also create templates,
or links to predefined groupings of attributes, if they find them
interesting and relevant.

(Note that this would allow people to create "Jewish mass murderers"
categories easily :))

> _Or_ editors could simply add all the attributes and forget about the
> template. Attributes on [[de:Marie Curie]] (I'm not making this up):

Ok, you did understand, I was just unclear.

>
> woman chemist physicist polish (+ some more)
>
> I guess splitting woman into person and female seemed too awkward to the
> Germans. Wimps.

Heh, what do they do for young girls?

Steve