On 2/16/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
appears in that Category, but not in the Category: Cancer deaths. Shouldn't he appear in this Category also since cancer is what he died from? It seems the only way to accomplish this is to include both Categories in his Article. However, when I have done this in the past, in other similar situations, I have gotten a whole lot of grief. What gives?
on 2/15/07 6:14 PM, Steve Bennett at stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
This discussion pretty well summarises a perennial problem with categories. There are two choices: Put the article in the broad category and its subcategory, or just in the subcategory.
Problems with putting it in both categories: The broad category can get unmanageably large and impossible to navigate. Problems with putting in just the subcategory: There is no software support to retrieve the set of all articles in all subcats and the broad category. There is also no sufficiently tight definitino of "subcategory" to distinguish between true (taxonomic) subcategories and rough (thematic) subcategories. A lung cancer death is truly a cancer death. But someone born in Strasbourg is not truly someone born in France[1] (and there are much better examples than this).
Steve [1] IIRC, Strasbourg has previously been part of Germany, so you can't assume that a Strasbourgeois was actually born in France.
Excellent assessment, Steve. The question, for me, remains is software support to retrieve the set of all articles in all subcats and the broad category being developed? I sincerely hope so.
Marc