Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 6/4/06, Roger Luethi collector@hellgate.ch wrote:
On Sat, 03 Jun 2006 17:27:59 -0400, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
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.
That's why nobody made it, but not why it shouldn't be done.
I'd say it's both. There shouldn't be categories with only one article in them. IMO that's just common sense.
They should be avoided, but I would not proscribe them. If you are sub-categorizing mammals you still need to deal with the ones that are so different (like the platypus) that they will end up in a one article category.
In the current system categories should have a fair number of articles in them. If there are too many, they should be broken up. If there are too few, they should be combined. There isn't a crystal clear line what constitutes too many and what constitutes too few, but a category with only one article in it clearly has too few.
The problem of categories having too many articles in them wouldn't really be a problem if the software allowed you to automatically compute category intersections. But the software doesn't do this, so people make do with what they've got.
Exactly
For instance, how do you connect the districts of Paris to the category Paris? What is a subset of the parent attribute "Paris": "Districts of Paris", or "Quartier Latin", or neither? Does it bother you if the article on a French district is now in a subcategory of "Capitals in Europe"?
[[Category:Paris]] is a theme, not an attribute, so [[Category:Paris]] should not be a subcategory of [[Category:Capitals in Europe]].
Is it practical to have people debating whether something is a theme or an attribute?
Or going back to [[Category:Women]]: You could declare that only articles on instances of women (i.e. biographies) can ever be under that category, and that only sets of such articles can ever be subcategories of the category women. -- You could even create a separate [[Category:Woman]], subcategories like "female reproductive organs" containing articles like uterus. -- But how would you express the undisputed relationship between female human beings and your example [[Category:Feminine hygiene]]? How about [[Category:Women's rights]]? Add an umbrella cat "Somehow related to women" maybe?
Roger
[[Category:Women]] could be a subcategory of [[Category:Woman]]. Making an attribute a subcategory of a theme is allowed, it is the reverse that is not allowed.
Avoid distinctions that will have to be re-explained every time another newbie joins.
In any event, things wouldn't be perfect. Ultimately the best solution would involve fixing the category system itself, a process which should be approached carefully so as to avoid making the same mistakes all over again. The advantage of my proposal to not allow themes as subcategories of attributes is that it can be implemented today, without much disruption, and without modifying any code. Plus, it allows for a relatively straightforward upgrade path when the category system is fixed. The proposal itself is not the fix, it's a temporary workaround.
As an alternative, it would probably be possible to do all of this even without enforcing the subcategory rule. But all purely attribute categories would have to be identified as such. I'll have to think about that.
One can work towards this, but any enforcement is a bit like passing a law that requires everybody to think logically.
Ec