[Wikipedia-l] Re: Categories in the PHP script

[Simon Kissane]

--- Robert Bihlmeyer <robbe+wiki at orcus.priv.at> wrote:
[snip]
> * Why is this scheme better than Magnus's (noting on
> a page itself that it belongs to categories X, Y,
Z)?
> 
> Almost no good category list is just a random jumble
> of links.
I both agree and disagree. An organized collection of
links can be useful. But an alphabetical list of
articles in the category can still be quite useful. 

I know it might sound like a bit of an overkill, but
we could have both -- we could have organized and
unorganized category pages, the unorganized ones
automatically generated, the organized ones made by
hand. Since we'd only have to maintain one (the
organized one), its really no more work than we have
at the moment.

I think generating category pages to display to the
user is only one use for categories -- there are uses
for software-understood categories as well, like siome
of the uses I and Larry have mentioned in our
respective posts. So a categorisation that doesn't
automatically feed into the category page might still
be useful.

> For example [[Prime ministers of Great Britain]] 
> should probably be sorted in chronological 
> order.
Ideally, I'd like to have the software understand
objects like "Incumbent", with little fields of data
like "Office, Name, Start Date, End Date"... That way
we could produce little databases of office holders,
etc... They could be used to generate a category,
sorted whichever way you wish. And, since they'd be
databases, the information in them would be easily
available to dumb software (exactly what you'd do with
it though, I don't know.) I've been thinking about
doing this, although its not really a priority at the
moment.

> "Proper" categories like [[Computer science]]
> are best represented by dividing the listing into
> subfields (as done in the current page).
Well, my suggestion was that they would be
subcategories, or independent categories in their own
life... so an algorithm could go in the category
[[Computer Science/Algorithms]], or alternatively in
both the [[Computer Science]] category and the
[[Algorithms]] category. Using a modification of
Magnus' proposal you could display the contents of
multiple categories on the one page.

> Magnus's scheme could support this via more 
> complicated syntax (e.g. {{{CATEGORY P.M. of Great 
> Britain;1985}}}, or
> {{{CATEGORY Computer science;Algorithms}}}), but
that
> reeks a bit of overengineering.
I think in the case of Algorithms, it makes sense.
Most category systems permit subcategories, so why not
have a "Computer Science/Algorithms" category?

As to the P.M, well, I agree with you that seems a bit
overengineered.

> Plus writers would have to coordinate their efforts 
> (choose the same subcategorisation, and/or sort 
> order) -- coordination is easier done on a single 
> page (the category) than across a number of pages.
I don't envision the primary responsibility for
categorisation necessarily being with the writer of
the page. Writing articles, and categorising them, are
different tasks, and don't need to be done by the same
people. (One is like an author, the other like a
librarian.)

> So the promise of "just editing one page instead of
> two or more" is a fallacy IMO. Even with the 
> extended synatx above, you'd first have to
> check out the category page(s) to see the existing
> layout before you could sensibly write the correct 
> category link(s).
Well, it depends on how well you know the category,
and how it is organized. If you are thinking of just
assigning things to major categories, like "Physics",
or "Philosophy" and "History", and we are in the
process of assigning 20,000 articles to these major
categories, then just being able to click "Edit this
page", add "{{CATEGORY}}}" and save is a lot simpler.

Simon J Kissane

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