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> Digging in, it turned out “Apple” belonged to the category Steve Jobs which eventually belonged to… “People,” of course. It turned out Wikipedia categories ar
by testplzignore 8y ago
> Digging in, it turned out “Apple” belonged to the category Steve Jobs which eventually belonged to… “People,” of course. It turned out Wikipedia categories aren’t strictly hierarchical at all, but are used for so many “related” things as to make them useless for determining what kind of a thing an article represented.
This feels like a problem worth solving on Wikipedia itself. It would be nice if categories could be marked as non-hierarchical, so that for a given category, you could know whether its articles could be classified under all of the ancestor categories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Eponymous_categories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Eponymous_categories would be a good place to start. Probably most of those are not hierarchical.
- tyingq 8y agoWikidata is structured. Here's the entry for Apple: https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Q312 https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Q312
- yorwba 8y agoUnfortunately, Wikidata has a lot less structured data than the semi-structured data you can get out of Wikipedia. A database like Wikidata simply doesn't get the same broad user base as Wikipedia, and therefore also fewer contributions.
- jpatokal 8y agoWikidata is one of the backends of Wikipedia and much of its information has been extracted from there.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thaumasiotes 8y ago>> It turned out Wikipedia categories aren’t strictly hierarchical at all, but are used for so many “related” things as to make them useless for determining what kind of a thing an article represented. > This feels like a problem worth solving on Wikipedia itself. Why would that be a problem at all? "Apple" (I assume this refers to the company) makes perfect sense in the "Steve Jobs" category. If you looked up the listing for Category:Steve_Jobs you'd expect to find it there. "Fixing" this problem would just make Wikipedia worse. The better fix would be to realize that categories aren't strictly hierarchical, and you shouldn't operate as if they are.