[WikiEN-l] Category destruction

[cohesion]

On 5/2/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> Judson,
>
> OK, that's fine. If you are getting what you need - that's what matters.
>
> My needs are a bit different. Repeating (for the upteenth time :-)): Joe
> Smith died from Cancer; specifically, liver cancer. I want to be able to
> call up all of the persons who died from cancer, then call up all who died
> from liver cancer - two separate searches - two separate lists. As WP is
> constructed now, to do this, both the Categories "Cancer" and "Liver cancer"
> must be entered in Joe's Article. It's really not that complicated.

Sorry for my sarcasm in comparing categories to random article, I was
actually agreeing with you, that categories are only useful for things
like date-based work queues, which I assume was not the reason they
were made.

I think for what you want they aren't that useful. And I think that
MANY MORE people would use it in the way you want than in the way I'm
using it. Currently they are useful for wikipedians doing specific
workflows. Ideally they could be used for actually getting useful
information out of wikipedia.

I will preface this all with saying I don't take much part in the
on-wiki category discussions, but here's how I would fix it:

1. Forget any concept of hierarchy (except when obviously useful) It's
never going to be a large scale hierarchy, so don't try.
2. Stop worrying about having too many categories on a particular
article. Maybe every single person *should* be in [[Category:People]]
why not?

That or use semantic mediawiki and say [[died from::cancer]] in the
article, but no one likes that idea for some reason.

Judson
[[:en:User:Cohesion]]