On 6/6/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca>
wrote:
I'm deliberately leaving the "or
its subcategories" off of the is-a template, so that we can continue
having things like [[Category:Seattle]] be a subcategory of
[[Category:Cities in Washington]] (or whatever the real category names
are) like we do now.
I think we just decided in the long thread that that's a bad idea as follows:
Cities in Washington is a taxonomic category
Seattle is a thematic category
Thematic categories should never be subcategories of taxonomic
categories (although the reverse is ok)
If your proposal is to allow for a graceful changeover, then I understand.
I don't think a "changeover" is needed, and I don't see why thematic
categories being subcategories of taxonomic categories is a bad thing
provided the categories are all properly labelled. The way things are
now are pretty intuitive for human browsing, which makes sense since
humans are the ones that organized it the way it is. But if you want to
spider a collection of articles on a taxonomic basis (for example
building a list of all cities in the United States with articles) then
all you need to do is write the spider to ignore subcategories that
aren't labelled as taxonomic. It'll ignore [[Category:Seattle]] and all
the contents thereof.
Seems to me that forbidding thematic subcategories to taxanomic
categories will result in a huge number of orphaned thematic categories.