[WikiEN-l] Types of categories

Wed Jun 7 18:46:31 UTC 2006

Steve Bennett wrote:

>On 6/4/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
>  
>
>>>I've personally run into this when trying to automatically create, for
>>>example, a list of all Wikipedia articles on people.  You can't just
>>>start at [[category:people]] and work your way down, because you wind
>>>up going to [[Category:Women]] (fine, all women are people) then
>>>[[Category:Feminine hygene]] (bad).
>>>      
>>>
>>Okay, that's equivalent to Steve's Amelie-Paris relation. I agree that's a
>>problem.
>>    
>>
>The problem there, now that I think about it, is that Paris should not
>be in the category "Paris" (as was pointed out by someone else).
>
>Amelie should be in the category "Paris"
>The article Paris should be in the category "European capitals" (say)
>The article Paris should not be in the category "Paris"
>The category "Paris" should not be in the category "European capitals".
>
>Actually, even simply obeying this last rule would solve it: Paris
>*the article* belongs in the taxonomic category (Paris *is a* European
>capital) , but "Paris" the category is thematic, so should only belong
>to thematic categories: maybe "Europe" in this case.
>
>That actually seems to fix the problem. I saw this with The Beatles
>for example. John Lennon was in category "The Beatles" (thematic), and
>that category was in "British rock bands" (taxonomic), leading to the
>conclusion that Lennon was a British rock band.
>
You can't avoid multiple categorizations.  The category "European 
capitals" would not exclude Paris from the category "Cities of France".  
The Beatles would still be in "1960s rock bands".  Do you need to 
priorize time over place?  Eponymous recursions are really a very minor 
problem since they never involve more than a single article in a category.

Ec