[Wikipedia-l] Categories considered harmful

Mon Jun 21 00:27:19 UTC 2004

Lars Aronsson wrote:

>In the field of digital libraries, there is a subculture that likes to
>discuss "thesauri and ontologies", especially bordering on the
>"semantic web" subculture.  It seems to me that most people in the
>thesauri and ontologies subculture are from Germany and have some kind
>of German library science background.  I'm talking about stuff like
>http://www.ecdl2003.org/ecdl.tutorials.html#tutorial4
>and http://www.jcdl2004.org/tutorials.htm#t2a
>  
>
I'm not sure this is purely a national issue: there's quite a few US 
researchers working on "sematic web" stuff, and it's one of the trendy 
areas of research these days.  Nobody seriously defends the Dewey 
Decimal system as a modern classification system---its defenders mostly 
cite reasons of continuity and compatibility with existing 
categorizations (such as physical library holdings), and say that these 
outweigh any deficiencies, as it is, in their viewpoint, suboptimal but 
still more than good enough.

(Of course, there's lots of viewpoints falling to any side of that one.)

I do think ad-hoc categorization is going to end up mostly useless.  
Either it's going to end up hierarchical, but with a rather 
idiosyncratic and arbitrary hierarchy, or it's going to be very 
inclusive and overlapping, with most articles fitting under a large 
number of categories.  Nearly all medical articles can go under 
[[Category:Alternative medicine]] as well, for example; [[The Bible]] 
can go under about a million categories relating to Christian sects, or 
even non-Christian religions, sects, groups, cults, and all manner of 
other organizations that have something to say about the Bible; etc.

-Mark