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

[John Lee]

On 4/10/07, 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 agree with Andrew. I understand the frustration about the real precision
that obsessive categorisers have engendered which sometimes makes the
category system pointless, but at the same time, I also understand that this
frustration stems from technological problems rather than problems with how
we categorise articles. (Although if it's getting to the point where we have
a category for each article, then we've probably gone overboard...)

The way I see it, it really makes more sense to develop MediaWiki to the
point where intersections and unions of categories are possible and
feasible. This would resolve the problem nicely; for instance, if Marc wants
to see every article under [[Category:Lung cancer]], he just tells the
software to display the union of all subcategories (and presumably all their
subcats, and so on) under [[Category:Lung cancer]].

At the same time, though I don't like the tag system that's become almost
omnipresent in blogs (mainly for the same reasons Andrew has articulated), I
don't see why it shouldn't be ruled out. It'd be nice to have, and I don't
see how it could hurt - although obviously since, as David notes, it'll
place a huge strain on our servers, it shouldn't be implemented until we
have the technical horsepower to handle it. Also, tags should come secondary
to a better process for handling categories - I think it'd be far more
invaluable to support unions and intersections of categories rather than to
simply have tags for articles.

Johnleemk