[WikiEN-l] Types of categories

Tue Jun 6 17:28:45 UTC 2006

On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 07:54:27 -0400, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> That brings up another, longer term, to-do for categories: they should
> be language independent.  For instance [[Marie Curie]] is in de: and
> en: (they happen to have the same title, but even if they don't they
> are linked via interwiki links).  [[Kategorie:Pole]] is linked to
> [[Category:Polish people]].  So there should be no need to categorize
> Marie Curie twice (multiply by the actual number of languages which
> have a Polish people category and an article on Marie Curie).

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata

> This is pretty simple theoretically.  The only real problem is getting
> the multiple category schemes in sync.  Considering your point about
> how the German categorization scheme differs from the English one,
> this might be a lot harder in practice than it is in theory.

Right. You _could_ make it work on some categories, say "Women" or
"Nobelprize winners".

It cannot possible work for all categories, though, because different
languages know different categories. For instance, security and safety is
the same word in German: Sicherheit. Thus, [[de:Lifebelt]] is in the German
category that is linked to the English category Security.

Numbers are much easier to share. Population of a country. Weight of a
molecule.

> Personally I don't see the difference between taxonomies and
> attributes, as described.  But I suppose one (taxonomies?) could be
> described as partitioning (an article can only be in one taxonomy
> category) whereas attributes can be mixed.  Under that definition

I suspect this is impossible. But it's hard to tell if you're not even sure
what counts as a taxonomy.

Roger