[WikiEN-l] Types of categories

Sat Jun 3 19:25:48 UTC 2006

On 6/3/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm probably not the only one who envisages all the wonderful things
> that could be done with this massive collection of information that is
> Wikipedia, *if only* we could do something clever with the categories.
> And then you realise that you can't really do anything clever because
> "category" has all sorts of different meanings to different people.
........
> So my questions are these:
> *Can anyone think of other types of categories I might have missed?
> *How could Wikipedia be better if this general problem was addressed?
> *How could this problem be addressed?
>
> Steve

I'd say you can't, and possibly shouldn't try to address this. Any
more rigorous and useful system would entail vast, vast amounts of
work which no one wants to do (compare with the remarkable, even
blockbuster sucess of en's Persondata - and Persondata is much easier
than devising and implementing a rigorous category system, since such
systems are domain-specific and simply *hard* to do well), especially
when there are much more pressing issues, like simple accuracy or
decent writing to worry about.

~maru