Wikipedia talk:Categorization/Archive 2

message: My main question is about changing a category.  What I've noticed is that if you edit an article and rename the category ie if the category was incorrect or too general, it will create a link in the new category page, but the link remains also in the previous category page, even though that link does not show on the subject article page. For example Jack Nicholson was originally categorised as Category:Actors.  I'd read on the categorisation talk page that Paul McCartney should be British musician, but not musician, because British musician would be a subcategory of musician, so I applied the same logic and changed Jack to Category:U.S. actors and actresses where he now appears.  But in the Category:Actors page he still appears even though there should be nothing to link him there, and in the Jack Nicholson article page, the only category now visible is Category:U.S. actors and actresses.  Does anyone know why that would be?  Am I doing something wrong or is there a problem with the database or what?
:No, it's nothing you've done wrong - unless someone else has changed it in the meantime, its just a caching issue - your machine still has the old versions of the page.  I've found even forcing a full refresh doesn't help, you just need to wait a while.  BTW, I noticed there are a lot of names under :Category:Actors that will eventually need to be recategorised into less specific groups (as you have already done) Chuq 13:15, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I would think Vocalists==Singers, therefore Pop singers is a sub-category of Vocalists.  Then you have the Britney thing.  It doesn't matter how NPOV you want to get, or what you think of her, she can't sing live and shouldn't be classified as a vocalist.  :Category:Musical performers or :Category:Entertainers?  I think :Category:Record company whores would be classifed as NPOV :P  It IS a tough one though.. Chuq 13:15, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

text: Just type [:Category:Category name]] (note the extra colon before 'Category'). Chuq 13:15, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

text: I've occasionally mused that :Category:Public accomodations could be useful for Paris Hilton and Paris Hilton (hotel). - Nunh-huh 05:21, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Category:Accidental amateur porn movie actresses?  :Category:People who can fellate while they claim to be asleep? :)  (Apologies if this has offended anyone) -- Chuq 01:37, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Questions about categories

message: My understanding is that the purpose of the category system is to allow automatic cross-checking of lists.  Wouldn't the best way to do this be to make each category give one fact?  :Category:American musicians would be automatically generated by cross-checking :Category:Musicians and :Category:American people. Tuf-Kat 05:14, Jun 10, 2004 (UTC)
:Or one could do it by having Category:Musicians and Category:American people both inherit the contents of Category:American musicians. I suspect it'll be hard to reach a consensus on which of the two approaches is the One True Best Way; I can see the appeal of both of them. Bryan 05:18, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: It would be neat to search by category like that.  But first, all people must be put in their nationality category, and I notice a lot of people editing category stuff don't bother to look for nationality, etc...   Has anyone done a bot to partially automate any of this? --ssd 02:39, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Simplest categories

message: So, having discovered, much to my dismay, that piped links can not be used to change an article's display on the category page (merely its alphabetic classification for ordering purposes), I decided to do so to organize :Category:Albums by artist so that :Category:A Tribe Called Quest albums would be located after :Category:Toto albums and before :Category:Triumph albums.  Unfortunately, piped links apparently do not actually cause the computer to treat the link as though it were the piped text (in this case "Tribe Called Quest albums") but actually organize it under a separate letter.  This leads to the unique circumstance of there being two separate sections for the letter "T", one with all the bands whose category page begins with that letter, and one for those bands whose category page is piped so that it begins with that letter.  Is this also a feature I was unaware of, or is it a bug? Tuf-Kat 22:35, Jun 11, 2004 (UTC)
:: Yes I'm guessing it is a bug in the sub category listing code only, using the pipe on an articles worked for me on :Category:Cricket.  Note the World cup listings.Steven jones 01:19, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: More piped link fun

message: Some of the ideas of Beland above I've also been thinking about: see Describing the relations right at the top of this page. Since I wrote that I've done some more investigations on this topic. I think I must have been a librarian in a previous life :-)
There's a lot of effort right now in the W3C to create a semantic web: effectively, to build knowledge into web pages systematically so that computer programs (such as search engines) can make semantic judgements about the content - to distinguish between Queen the musical group and Queen the title, for instance. One outcome of this effort is OWL, Web Ontology Language, an XML application which also uses concepts from RDF.
OWL lets you create an ontology for a domain: usually a hierarchical data structure describing the actual things (people, places, pizzas, camera parts, wines, whatever you want to describe - known as individuals in OWL-speak), the types of things (classes and subclasses, with a strict "is a" relationship from class to superclass), and the properties of those things (for a person, this might include their birth date, gender, place of work, and so on - and crucially, properties can link individuals to other individuals). The properties themselves can also be described with a strict class hierarchy (for wines, "has characteristic" would be the superclass of "has colour" and all those other things wine people talk about).
In OWL, each individual has one or more classes: a pizza might be a member of the "vegetarian pizza" class and the "spicy pizza" class. Part of the power of OWL lies in the ability to describe what a "vegetarian pizza" actually is: it's a pizza with no meat toppings and no fish toppings. You can also make statements about properties such as "this property is transitive" (if A and B are related along a property, and B and C are related along the same property, then with a transitive property you can infer that A and C are also related along the property - for example, "ancestor" is transitive).  (This is necessarily a heavily simplified description!)
Anyone who's interested in building a true ontology (that is, something that a program can make semantic judgements about) for Wikipedia content should look at OWL. (If I get a spare few days I may beef up the Wikipedia article on the subject. If not, then read the W3C documents, though they're not for XML newbies.)
My gut tells me that OWLifying Wikipedia would be technically possible but a huge pain to introduce. Each article is an individual; there could be a "meta" tab alongside "talk" for an article's OWL data or its wikitax equivalent. A wiki category is an OWL class (but a strict "is a" hierarchy would need to be enforced here). Properties would live in a separate namespace equivalent to category/class. A category/class would also have a "meta" tab that describes the class (restricting its members semantically, etc).
Of course, there is the big overriding question: does this solve anyone's problem? Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow...
-- Avaragado 09:24, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Ontology (computer science)|Ontologies]] and [[OWL]]

message: Who decides how to name a category? Is it just the first person to come along? Why is one category  Category:Israeli people, but another Category:People from Luxembourg? Why not Category:People from Israel or Category:Luxembourgeois people? Or just plain 
Category:Israelis or Category:Luxembourgeois? Why is it Category:Israeli actors and actresses but, Category:Cinema actors? What about Category:Cinema actresses? Or for that matter, who's to stop there being a Category:Filmstars? Who decided it's Category:Children's writers as opposed to Category:Children's literature writers or Category:Children's authors or Category:Young Adult writers or any other of a zillion variations? 
Are there any stated conventions anywhere? And, how in the name of Dewey does one navigate the special page of Categories, to see which Categories are already in use? --Woggly 09:39, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Category naming conventions