On 6/5/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
Way back in the mists of history when categories were
first implemented
I created a couple of templates intended to be put onto the category
pages to identify whether the category contained articles that were
examples of the category's subject or articles that were just _about_
the category's subject. There seemed to be no interest in using them and
I didn't think it important enough to raise a fuss about, so I figured
I'd just sit back and watch how categorization actually got used rather
than trying to impose my vision on it.
Perhaps it'd be useful to recreate similar templates now, though, if
enough people think it's a problem? That way there'd be no major
disruption to the category tree, but people who wanted to do fancy
culling of subsets of articles could add just a little parsing
intelligence to whatever program they're using to determine what types
of categories they're dealing with.
This does sound like a good start, but will need some intelligence in
its application. One of the problems is that good categorisation is
somewhat challenging, and the "average person" won't necessarily make
good use of these templates. In fact the same could probably be said
for all semantic markup, of which this is an example.
Do you have any examples? What would they look like? Perhaps:
{{thematic category|name of subject}}
--> This category should be applied to all articles which have a
strong link with <name of subject>
and
{{taxonomic category|type of thing|thematic category}}
--> This category should be applied to articles which are an example
of a <type of thing>, and which do not belong to a subcategory.
Articles which are just related to this topic should go in
[[:Category:<Thematic category>]] instead.
Anyone want to mock one up?
Steve