Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 6/4/06, Roger Luethi <collector(a)hellgate.ch>
wrote:
On Sat, 03 Jun 2006 17:27:59 -0400, Anthony
DiPierro wrote:
Categories
based on such intersections of attributes are conceptually bad.
Look at the categories for an article like [[Marie Curie]]: She's French
three times, female four times, Polish four times (not counting "Natives of
Warsaw"), etc. Why not create [[Category:Polish women who were born in
1867 and died in 1934 and won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry and in Physics]]?
Because there would only be one person in that category.
That's why nobody made it, but not why it shouldn't be done.
I'd say it's both. There shouldn't be categories with only one
article in them. IMO that's just common sense.
They should be avoided, but I would not proscribe them. If you are
sub-categorizing mammals you still need to deal with the ones that are
so different (like the platypus) that they will end up in a one article
category.
In the current system categories should have a fair
number of articles
in them. If there are too many, they should be broken up. If there
are too few, they should be combined. There isn't a crystal clear
line what constitutes too many and what constitutes too few, but a
category with only one article in it clearly has too few.
The problem of categories having too many articles in them wouldn't
really be a problem if the software allowed you to automatically
compute category intersections. But the software doesn't do this, so
people make do with what they've got.
Exactly
For instance,
how do you connect the districts of Paris to the category
Paris? What is a subset of the parent attribute "Paris": "Districts of
Paris", or "Quartier Latin", or neither? Does it bother you if the article
on a French district is now in a subcategory of "Capitals in Europe"?
[[Category:Paris]] is a theme, not an attribute, so [[Category:Paris]]
should not be a subcategory of [[Category:Capitals in Europe]].
Is it practical to have people debating whether something is a theme or
an attribute?
Or going back
to [[Category:Women]]: You could declare that only articles
on instances of women (i.e. biographies) can ever be under that category,
and that only sets of such articles can ever be subcategories of the
category women. -- You could even create a separate [[Category:Woman]],
subcategories like "female reproductive organs" containing articles like
uterus. -- But how would you express the undisputed relationship between
female human beings and your example [[Category:Feminine hygiene]]? How
about [[Category:Women's rights]]? Add an umbrella cat "Somehow related to
women" maybe?
Roger
[[Category:Women]] could be a subcategory of [[Category:Woman]].
Making an attribute a subcategory of a theme is allowed, it is the
reverse that is not allowed.
Avoid distinctions that will have to be re-explained every time another
newbie joins.
In any event, things wouldn't be perfect.
Ultimately the best
solution would involve fixing the category system itself, a process
which should be approached carefully so as to avoid making the same
mistakes all over again. The advantage of my proposal to not allow
themes as subcategories of attributes is that it can be implemented
today, without much disruption, and without modifying any code. Plus,
it allows for a relatively straightforward upgrade path when the
category system is fixed. The proposal itself is not the fix, it's a
temporary workaround.
As an alternative, it would probably be possible to do all of this
even without enforcing the subcategory rule. But all purely attribute
categories would have to be identified as such. I'll have to think
about that.
One can work towards this, but any enforcement is a bit like passing a
law that requires everybody to think logically.
Ec