On 8/24/06, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
To answer your "why?" question: Because subcategories don't work. The princple that "If X is a subcat of Y, then Z should not be in both X and Y" is totally bogus and unworkable - at the moment.
Why that?
Because, as we've agreed, it's not easy to browse both a category and its subcats at the moment. Your response is not to use subcats. My response is to put articles in both the category and its subcat.
Just my gut feeling - what's the use of this category? Would anyone think "Hey, this is a fictional Jeet Kune Do practitioner, I would want more of those". Still, I agree that after all the category is good, because you *would* want to have them in Category:Jeet Kune Do practioners, but when getting to that category from a real person, you don't want to bump into the fictional characters. So, in the end, I'm happy with this one.
I think you're overlooking the value of categories as semantic markup.
I disagree with that. Strongly. A category is to find similar subjects, and that is best done by having a certain size of
That's only one, fairly narrow use.
categories. Split them up further, and you only give more work to those trying to look something up. Going with your principle would
Because the software is no good at grouping subcats together. (Not blaming the developers, we just don't have a good category/subcategory model).
Well, it's the thing we discussed before. Or at least the thing I thought we were discussing before. It's a subcategory of tennessee counties, but the articles in it are not about Tennessee counties, but about cities. I don't see why you vehemently oppose putting "Jesus" under 'People executed for heresy" yet consider putting "Haywood County, Tennessee" in "Tennessee counties" 'good working order'. To me it's twice the same kind of thing.
Sorry, that's my mistake, didn't realise that the *category* "Haywod County, Tennessee" was in "Tennessee counties". There's got to be a better model for this stuff that makes more sense.
We are here to make the encyclopedia, not to make a classification scheme of everything. It would, in my opinion, be so much more useful
Well, we could simply have 1,300,000 uncategorised pages. Or we could build an information rich categorisation scheme that makes pages easy to find and establishes meaningful links between them.
to have (for example) one category about "1860s in Mexico" than to have to go through 11 categories to find those. Again my question is: What is the use of categories? To me it is, getting similar pages
They seem to have lots of uses, and the better the model, and the better the implementation, probably the more uses we will come up with. Saying "Categories are only good for X" is unnecessarily restrictive.
Steve