Yaron Koren wrote: > What's up, Dataweaver, > > The topic *has* been discussed before, but it's still an interesting one, > and apparently it hasn't been discussed enough because there still doesn't > seem to be consensus on the issue. :) That quote in the documentation is > interesting - I hadn't seen it before. I personally think it should be > updated to indicate that this is a description of the way things *currently > are*, not at all a recommendation - I believe that categories should only > ever be used to indicate class. Otherwise, as you note, the current system > would need a variety of changes to be able to differentiate the one kind of > category from the other.
Well, that's the beauty of extensions: those who like what they do can install them, and everyone else can ignore them. :) FWIW, I _do_ see your point; and in certain highly technical environments, I even agree with it, as I indicated in my first message. But I don't think that it's so compelling of a point that everyone should be forced to adopt it; there is something to be said for Category:City including articles about cities in general as well as articles about individual cities; and mandating that articles must describe instances of the categories that they belong to necessarily forbids the former. Likewise, another possible solution (that I personally don't like) would be to have two category namespaces: one for categories-as-classes, and another for categories-as-related-topics. So [[Class:City]] could then be used to collect all articles about individual cities, while [[Category:City]] could be used to collect all other articles about city-related topics. Or [[Category:City]] could be used for the former purpose, and some other namespace could be used for the latter; but I personally think that if you _mean_ "this is a class", you should _say_ "this is a class", instead of co-opting "category" for that purpose. I don't like this solution because it's getting too rigid for my liking. The semantic wiki is not a conceptual subset of the ontology: ontologies exist to describe things and to reason about them, while semantic wikis exist to document them - thus the reason why articles and their OWL/RDF exports are given separate URIs (the document is not the thing that it documents), and also the reason why it's OK that not every possible relation that can be expressed in an ontology can be expressed in a semantic wiki. And this is the reason why the concept of "Category" shouldn't be replaced with the concept of "Class". Mind you, I can see the benefit of not having "articles about cities in general" mixed in with "articles about individual cities", probably the biggest selling point of separate namespaces. If my proposal were to be accepted, I'd also want the index of a Category page to be grouped by the type: so Category:City would list the articles about individual cities first, followed by the articles about cities in general, in the same manner that it already separates the subcategories from the articles. > And if Wikipedia ever does adopt SMW, I would look forward to a mass > deletion of categories over the span of, say, several weeks. :) O_o Given the size of Wikipedia, I expect that several months would be needed, minimum; and given the nature of the contributor base, I suspect that an ongoing battle would have to be fought to ensure that Catogories never again get "misused" (by your definition) - especially if no alternative is provided. -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Semediawiki-devel mailing list Semediawiki-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-devel
