[WikiEN-l] CATEGORIES!!!!!!

[George Herbert]

On 4/9/07, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/10/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> > on 4/9/07 8:12 PM, Steve Bennett at stevagewp at gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > > Um, what changes? If anything, it's probably a bunch of little changes
> > > caused by different people. I doubt very much that there's a single
> > > person who inflict a set of changes on the rest of us with some clear
> > > purpose behind it all that they haven't explained.
> >
> > Steve,
> >
> > I've been through this enough to be frustrated with it.
> >
> > The reality is: In an Article about a person who died from lung cancer; if I
> > would add both the Categories "Cancer deaths" & "Lung cancer deaths" -
> > someone would come along very quickly and delete the main Cancer death
> > Category. If I go back and re-enter the Cancer death Category - the same
> > thing would happen. Options: engage in an editing war, or give up in
> > frustration. I choose the latter. This is happening every day!
>
> I agree with Thomas Dalton -- this is largely an issue about software
> features and tools to explore the relationship between categories and
> subcategories. It may be frustrating not being able to browse them
> easily right now, but fundamentally it's likely the right way to do
> it. Perhaps the harder question is how to get it listed as a priority
> for Mediawiki development.
>
> For an example of what can be done with categories, see:
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CategoryTree
>
> I'd say tags are not an accurate (or desirable) way to describe the
> category feature. Categories are much more like traditional taxonomy
> -- they are a controlled vocabulary with hierarchical relationships.
> Tags are uncontrolled and flat.
>
> -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

I'd almost think that what we want is to change default category
display.  If we have "Cancer Deaths", with a child subcategory of
"Lung Cancer Deaths", with a child subcategory of "Lung Cancer Deaths
due to Smoking", it would be nice if instead of a pile of category
stuff at the bottom, we just had one line per category with the bottom
category, intermediate ones, and top one listed per line.  So one line
with "Cancer Deaths -> Lung Cancer Deaths -> Lung Cancer Deaths due to
Smoking", all appropriately hotlinked.

We have the screen real estate to do that.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com