User talk:Sam/Archive 5

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Latest comment: 17 years ago11 comments2 people in discussion

--Copied from user talk:Rick Block#Subcategories--
Hi Rick, Haven't talked to you for a while. I'd like your opinion about something I've been thinking about quite a bit recently. As you probably know, I've been pushing for wider acceptance of duplication of articles in parents and their children for quite a while. Here's my present thinking about this, and what I'd like to propose to the developers:

Categories are a tool for browsing.
Categories are sometimes useful as an index of a subject, but often are not available as an index because they have been broken into subcategories and depopulated.
Many of these subcategories are in essence intersections of larger categories. For example, Category:American film directors can be though of as the intersection of Category:Film directors and Category:American people.
It would be useful to have categories fully populated at the "level of notability", by which I mean that directors are much more likely to be notable as "film directors" than as "American film directors".
There are many category intersections that do not exist that some people might find useful. Adding more and more intersections clutters up the category listings for articles.

To address all of these things I propose the following:

Categories be fully populated at the level of notability.
The software be modified so that category intersections get created on the fly.

Here's how it would work:

All the categories that are intersections would be deleted and their members moved to the larger categories at the level of notability. Some of these categories would be rather large (like Category:American people.

New wiki-markup would be added to the software to create dynamically created subcategories. Here's how it might look:

[[Subcategory:American people:Film directors]]

This markup would be added to the page Category:American film directors. The markup would initiate a database comparison of the categories listed to find the articles and subcategories listed in both categories. The page would be displayed as a "Sub-category" instead of as a "Category" which would indicate that it was dynamically created. There might be automatically generated text that would say something like, "This sub-category contains all the articles in Category:American people that are also in Category:Film directors. Additional text for the page could be created as normal, and the subcategory could be categorized as normal.

Articles could be placed in the category directly. For example List of American film directors could still be put in the category. There should be some visual indicator of the articles that are in the category directly and those that were from the intersection of the parents to help alert editors of miscategorized articles.

Articles would only list Categories on the bottom and not list all the Subcategories that they may be found in (unless they have been put in these categories directly by mistake). Perhaps, each category listed might have a check box, by clicking on some of the check boxes and then clicking on a link to "display subcategory" the user could go directly from the article to the dynamically created subcategory.

Does this sound like a good idea to you? Comments? Suggestions? Thanks. -- Samuel Wantman 10:26, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

--end copy--

Hi Samuel - yes, it's been a while. I hope things with you are going well. I haven't spent much time on categories lately, except for adding some comments about the naming conventions just recently. So, on the fly intersections? First, the general notion has been around for quite some time. Looking through the wikitech-l mailing list archives, someone even wrote the code implementing a version of category intersection ("category:Film directory/American people" would be the intersection of these two categories). The ensuing discussion pointed out that "/" was not a great choice, and brought up concerns that without including subcategories in the results that this would be of only limited use. Looking at requests currently open in bugzilla, there's bugzilla:5244 and bugzilla:2285. user:Steve block and I had a discussion a while ago about using flickr style tags (which I think exists nowhere except in the VPT archives) which I think is at least similar to what you're thinking. Let me turn this around - what do you think about the flickr sort of idea (and, if you've never visited flickr, give it try)? -- Rick Block (talk) 14:35, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

So, what do you think? -- Rick Block (talk) 04:12, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

I have been thinking about this quite a bit. I think the current system is a mess and needs changing. Have you seen the latest about category duplication at Wikipedia talk:Categorization. After months of work on this, I feel like I'm starting all over. The reality seems to be that it doesn't matter what decisions are reached through discussion, what matters is what common practice is and who is the most insistent.

So if there is going to be a change, I think it should try and hold onto the aspects of the current system that are good, and enhance it. I have looked at the flickr system, and I find it to be very disorganized. I suspect that unless handled well it could be a real mess here. But there are some good things about it, and I have been thinking about how to incorporate it into what we have. I don't want to abandon what we have, and I don't want people adding oodles of meaningless tags to thousands of articles. I'd like to keep the multiple taxonomies that we currently have, and encourage additional taxonomies. So If you take the ideas I mentioned above, I think it could work like this: Sort of a cross between what we have and flickr and apparently already doable and most of the code written according to the links you posted above.

As I mentioned, there would be no subcategories posted with articles only primary categories so instead of this (using Laurence Fishbourne as an example):

You would have this:

Show Sub-category matching all checked boxes

These categories are sort of like Flickr. None of them are intersections of other traits. Each listing would have a check box next to each category. You could check off what ever category you'd want and then click below to get the sub-category. In this case it is Category:African-American actors. It is interesting to me that most of these categories already exist. This adds a small amount of category "clutter". There are a few more categories than originally. But with this set up, ALL of the primary categories listed here would be fully populated and so would all the possible intersections of these categories. You would be able to see the intersection categories even if nobody had created the page for it, such as Category:African-American film actors from August, Georgia who appeared on M*A*S*H. This is just like when somebody puts an article in a category without creating the page. The sub-category would be created dynamically by finding the intersection. If the page hadn't been created yet, it would list all the articles and also have links to the primary categories used for the intersection. Editors could continue to create pages for these intersections and structure them however they want, just as done now. There would probably need to be a new way to indicate how to code an intersection, as I mentioned above.

I also think some of the process for categorization could be automated. For example, if someone just created the Laurence Fishbourne article, and put him in Category:African-American actors, perhaps the system could look at the page for the category and see that it is an intersection sub-category that has three parents. The software could make the changes to the article so that it gets categorized in all three parents.

In reading through the links you posted above, I notice that this proposal might not have the problems that were discussed. Perhaps it might actually be easy to implement. -- Samuel Wantman 07:28, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

At first reading (and I'll read it again) this sounds almost exactly like the flickr setup, but using "category" as the name rather than "tag". I agree it would be good to keep the name as category. As it stands, categories are internally a page tied to a database search with a combination of user entered text (the "prologue" bit you enter when you edit a category) and dynamically generated content based on the database search (the list of articles or subcategories). Allowing "intersection categories" be able to be explicitly created seems like a reasonable idea as well (it's the same setup as an existing category, but with a more complicated search than a simple "all articles in this one category"). As you suggest, if these are only intersections the software could allow adding articles to such categories (by actually adding the article to all the categories that are intersected).

A couple of the Fishbourne example categories bother me a bit, but I'm not quite sure what to do about it. Specifically, the "born in" hierarchy (if he was born in Augusta, George, he was obviously born in Georgia and obviously born in the U.S so Category:People from Georgia (U.S. state) and Americans seem to be implied), similarly Actors and Best Actor Academy Award nominees seem to overlap. These are strict subsets rather than intersections which means the "parent" category could theorectically be done as a union, but I'm not sure if most people would immediately understand the difference.

I think it might fundamentally be a quibble, but I'd prefer the intersection UI to be on the category page, rather than the article page. Perhaps the categories are all listed (on the article page) and you can click on any of them individually or click on the "categories" header (which takes you to the intersection of all of them). Then the "category page" shows the current list of "intersection" categories, each clickable to show all the articles in that category and with something to click (trailing "[-]"?) to remove the category from the current "intersection set"). The available intersection categories would be in a separate spot in the display (like underneath), again each individually clickable but also with something to click (trailing "[+]"?) to add them to the current intersection set. In any event, however the exact UI details get worked out I think the operations of refining or expanding the current intersection set would need to be available. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:07, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

I too am a little bothered by the Fisbourne example and don't exactly know what to do with it. One criteria in designing this is that it should remain easy to get to the categories that you can now get to. Since there are many nationality sub-categories currently (Category:American actors), and virtually none by state or city, it seems useful to make them easy to create. The Oscar one does not bother me, because it is already acceptable as a place to duplicate listing people. I also think that all people categories should be populated using an ALL or NONE rule. By this I mean, if you are going to have a few people in Category:People from Georgia (U.S. state) (which I just fixed in the examples above). It should contain EVERYONE in Georgia or NOBODY from Georgia because they are all in subcategories. The reason for this is so categories can be used as subject indexes. So having the multiple categorizations shows that there is community acceptance of having this duplication.

I have reservations about taking the intersection off of the article page. If I'm understanding you, you'd fist go to the category which is the intersection of everything and then remove categories from the intersection. I suspect for most articles there will only be one article listed in the intersection category. I doubt there are any other Oscar nominated African-American actors from Augusta Georgia that appeared on those TV series. So what you are in essence suggesting is that you go to another page to make the intersection selection. If we can come up with a good interface for doing it on the article page, I think that would be better than doing it on a separate page.

Here's another idea I've been kicking around. What if there there is some built in categories for all articles. The set I'm thinking of is PEOPLE, PLACE, THING, TOPIC, LIST, EVENT. Every article would have to be classified as one of these things. Perhaps there is a name-space for each of these things, and the first thing you have to do when you create a page is decide which name-space it belongs in. For example, Suspension bridge would be a topic, Golden Gate Bridge a thing, and San Francisco a place, Battle of Gettysburg an event, World War Two a topic. etc... Along with this, when you create or edit a category there would be a checkbox that would say what namespaces would be allowed in the category. There would be a checkbox for CATEGORIES, IMAGES, TEMPLATES, WIKIPEDIA PAGES, TALK PAGES, PORTALS, PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS, TOPICS, LISTS, EVENTS. So if Category:Entertainers does not have PEOPLE checked, you would not be able to put a PEOPLE article in the category. Perhaps, the Entertainers would show up in grey to indicate that it was not put in the category. If you clicked on the grey link you'd get a message that explained that you could not put PEOPLE articles in Category:Entertainers and to look in the subcategories of Category:Entertainers for categories where PEOPLE belong. There could also be separate sections for each of these namespaces for the category listings.

It is a clear consensus to not put people into Category:Entertainers, yet I think it would be useful to be able to se a complete index of what is in Category:Entertainers. So I've been wondering about having the ability to turn any Category into an INDEX. Perhaps there is a link at the top of each category that say "View as an Index". When you clicked on the link, you'd see the category presented as an outline. All the subcategories and articles would be combined into a single alphabetical list. The subcategories would be formated differently from the articles. There'd also be another option that said "Show contents of all subcategories" Clicking on this would add the contents of the subcategories to the category or list. If both options are selected the subcategory contents would be indented and listed directly under the subcategory heading. Indexes would only go a set number of levels deep. Perhaps the depth of the index could be a user preference. -- Samuel Wantman 22:29, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

In rereading what I just wrote, I noticed that my new idea could change things a little. If there are separate namespaces as described, and if each is shown in a different section on category pages, then you could redo Fishbournes categorization like this:

[GO]

This scheme would combine many categories together. For example, American people would be part of United States. To make this work, perhaps each section of a category could have a show/hide button. By default, perhaps any section with more than 50 entries starts out hidden. If not, then the categories would probably be too huge. -- Samuel Wantman 22:46, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

From the point of view of a general sofware package, I'm not sure I like the people/place/thing classification. Showing a category as an index is interesting, but I suspect it only works for subset hierarchies. It might be possible to have both explicit "intersection" categories (e.g. American actors) and "subset" categories (people born in Augusta, GA), although this might get pretty complicated pretty fast. I think since there is an example (flickr) that shows a way to deal with intersections, it might be worth keeping these notions separate and address only one (at first).

OK. So where would you like to go with this? We could enter it as a bugzilla request, or write something up as a proposal in wikipedia space to solicit more input, or post it to the Wikitech-l mailing list. Do you have a strong preference between these, or any other ideas for what to do next? -- Rick Block (talk) 17:55, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

I think we should come up with as good a proposal as we can and then invite people to come and discuss it, especially the developers. I have not been involved with the mailing lists or the irc channels, so I have no opionion about them. I notice that virtually all the old-timers who used to hang out at Wikipedia:Categorization and WP:CFD are no longer around. Things seem broken. There have been two discussions just today at Wikipedia talk:Categorization about this problem. One involves breaking up categories into English, Scottish, Welsh, etc... vs. just using British. Another is about Category:Board games.

Would you mind copying what you think makes the most sense from what we have written and starting a proposal? That way I could understand better where you are, and see if we are close to being in the same place. -- Samuel Wantman 08:51, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Sure. I'll draft something up today. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:54, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm working on it, but not done yet. I'll let you know when I have something that I think is reasonable (might be a few days even). It's harder than I thought to come up with something that's easy to use (and playing around with Flickr I can't figure out how to make it do intersections - I could have sworn this at least used to be possible). -- Rick Block (talk) 04:08, 31 July 2006 (UTC)