[WikiEN-l] Hello

Wed Dec 13 06:29:47 UTC 2006

On 12/12/06, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene at vanderpijll.nl> wrote:

> Unfortunately, it would not. At least, not completely. Categorization is
> not transitive: if article A is a member of category C, and C is a
> subcat of D, A need not be a member of D. For example: [[Seine]] is in
> [[Category:Paris]], which is in [[Category:Cities in France]], which is
> in [[Category:France]], which is in [[Category:Republics]], which
> ultimately is a subcat of [[Category:Thought]].
>
> But the Seine is not a thought, a republic, or a city in France.
>
> Categories as implemented now have mixed meanings: they can describe
> "is-a", "has-a" or "is-related-to" connections. See earlier
> discussions on this list in September 2004 and June 2006
> (http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/htdig/wikien-l/2006-June/048183.html).
>
> Eugene

This is a real problem, which an extension, semantic mediawiki,
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki) was made to solve.
It's definitely worth taking a look at for situations like this. It
allows you to do things like say, "Paris is a [[type:=city]] in
[[located in::France]], with a population of
[[population:=1,000,000,000]].  You can then do fun things like say,
show me all the cities with populations over 20 etc.

For this original example, Fred is a [[profession::writer]] who
committed [[type of death::suicide]]. [[Category:People]]  etc. You
could then query all the writers who's type of death was suicide
without having to have one million categories for every possible
union. I hope one day we can (maybe cross your fingers) use some of
this on the main wikipedia. It's usefulness as a replacement for a lot
of categories is one of the biggest benefits.

Judson
[[:en:User:Cohesion]]