On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 7:25 AM, Platonides <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If we're going to end up with hundreds of categories on each page, why > not make the software automatically add all parent categories? > It would fill the categorylinks table*, but it would as well by manually > adding them. > It would also require forcing the categories to be a graph and maybe > limiting the number of parent categories, as to reduce a bit how > expensive category position changes can be. But, if we leave that to > 'manual actions', the same actions would be performed by bots, leading > to the same cost and partially less coherent structure. [snip]
Because adding the parents produces non-sense results because "categorization" is a flawed concept except at the most fuzzy and course levels: Reality doesn't fit into neat nested boxes (not even the N-dimensional ones created by multiple parentage). The two primary problems are semantic drift (the further away you get from a relationship the more not-quite-matching error accumulates), and multiple link types (we use categories to describe different types of membership, and while within a type the membership relation is commutative among types it is usually not). So with parentages you get chains like [periodic table]->[hydrogen]->[hydrogen compounds]->[water]->[places with water]->[beaches]->[beaches in america]->[beaches of lalaville]->[lalavill beach]->[Image:Ironmeteor_at_lalavill_beach.jpg] Is an iron meteor a "beach in america" or a "hydrogen compound"? No. Offering all the parents with an easy checkbox interface that allows you quickly adopt all that apply would be great, but forcing their inclusion would produce rubbish. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
