[WikiEN-l] Categories (was: Hello)

Tue Dec 12 20:46:58 UTC 2006

Thank you, Steve, for making (painful) sense out of this issue for me. I
started school with a typewriter and finished post-grad with pretty much the
same. The only computer on campus was the size of my dorm.

I'll continue to campaign for changes; although as technochallenged as I am,
my arguments will need to remain philosophical.

Marc

> From: Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:26:57 -0500
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Categories (was: Hello)
> 
> I wrote:
>> My own take on the question is that Categories in their current
>> form are an imprecise mechanism, and that people should not try
>> to use them for precise tasks, or waste too much time arguing
>> about particular attempted more-precise usages.
> 
> By which I mean, the argument usually boils down to trying to
> decide precisely whether category membership is supposed to
> denote an "is-a", "has-a" or "is-related-to" relationship.
> But that can't be answered, so the arguments can never really be
> resolved, and people have to fall back to using categories not
> to implement rigid OO-like inheritable hierarchies, but rather,
> looser collections where the only semantic attached to category
> membership is "is-kinda-related-to".  Some categories and the
> editors who maintain them will reach some kind of loose,
> relatively informal consensus that they're categories which
> embody a web of loose relationships (e.g. "Topics relating to
> Paris"), and some will similarly reach some kind of loose,
> relatively informal consensus that they're categories which
> embody a tighter taxonomy (e.g. "Counties in California").
> 
> Now, despite what I said about the problem not being solveable
> without additional and potentially more-complicated technical
> mechanisms which aren't likely to happen soon, it seems to me
> that one loose, relatively informal, "soft" solution to the part
> of the problem would be to try to reflect a category's semantic
> in its name, e.g. "Category:Counties in California" and
> "Category:Arrondissements in Paris" and "Category:Topics relating
> to Paris", rather than just "Category:California" and
> "Category:Paris".  And we're probably doing a lot of that today.
> But there are still (and will always be) lots of problems when
> categories contain other categories, and we'll always be
> wondering whether category membership is or isn't or should or
> shouldn't be transitive, and it's these larger-scale questions
> which we can't (under the current architecture) ever fully
> satisfactorily resolve.
> 
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