[WikiEN-l] Re: A first encounter with Categories

Mon Jun 7 18:09:41 UTC 2004

I completely agree. I think the main thrust of categories right now
is that perhaps they are becomng very quickly fine-grained (Fine
grained categories are just more interesting perhaps).

Ideally, it would have best to have only coarse-grained categories at
first (using some kind of community process like Anthere described),
creating finer-grained ones only later.

I realize that this is hindsight, but I think in the long run
something like you propose would be very good and may eventually
result in the fine-grained categories being replaced by more
convenient coarse-grained ones. It would definitely make searching
much more easy, if you could choose from "Ohio" and "museums" rather
than having to search a much longer list for "museums of Ohio" or
"Ohio museums" or "museums in Ohio" or "museums (Ohio)" etc.

Daniel Mayer said:
> --- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>> Stan Shebs wrote:
>>
>> > there are a couple of different approaches. One is to
>> > create categories for every conjunction of categories - if you
>> have
>> > "hotels" and "museums" and "Ohio", that means you should have
>> "hotels
>> > in Ohio" and "museums in Ohio" categories.
>>
>> I favour this approach. Without it, [[Category:Museums]] would
>> contain
>> *all* museums in the world (millions!), and [[Category:Ohio]] would
>> contain absolutely *everything* about Ohio (cities, museums,
>> exhibitions, operas, theatres, cinemas, railways, bus lines,
>> sightseeing, TV stations, and all sorts of other unrelated things).
>
> That is simply bad database design. A user should be able to select
> [Museums]
> WITHIN [Ohio] or just [Museums] or even just [Ohio]. Otherwise
> different tags
> will be needed for all possible combinations of museums, sport
> stadiums, or
> amusement parks in every single area of the world. It would be much
> better to
> have tags for the places and tags for things. Let the user decide
> what
> combination of variables he or she wants to select. That will require
> an
> advanced search capability to be added to MediaWiki, but I assume
> that was
> planned anyway.
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>
>
>
>
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