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What's the difference between /Wheel of Time /TV Series/Wheel of Time /Video Game/Wheel of Time and /Wheel of Time /Wheel of Time (TV Series)

What's the difference between /Wheel of Time /TV Series/Wheel of Time /Video Game/Wheel of Time and /Wheel of Time /Wheel of Time (TV Series) /Wheel of Time (Video Game)

Terr_ 3y ago
Yeah, the non-flat hierarchy/tagging may be informal, but it still exists. (And for good reason.)
dgb23 3y ago
I like the second one better. In programming, it’s useful to have namespaces for overall organization and conflict resolution. But it’s a trade off: you are nudged into a hierarchical ontology, with all the implied issues. Wikipedia titles are free text (more or less). So they can afford not to introduce hierarchical naming and still have nice, easily addressable names without conflicts. This avoids all sorts of problems. Most things simply can’t be categorized in a strict, hierarchical manner.
aragonite 3y ago
I'd argue that "mental anguish" is probably less of a problem on the latter design, since the additional parenthetical material is used pure for disambiguation (and so is optional), not for categorization. So, on the latter design we can have: /Francis Bacon /Francis Bacon (artist) without having to answer anguish-inducing questions that would be raised by /Francis Bacon /artist/Francis Bacon e.g. questions such as: 1. "Maybe we should put Lord Bacon under a category also, maybe `philosopher/Francis Bacon`" 2. "But he's also a statesman ... what about `statesman/Francis Bacon`? Is he more of a philosopher or a statesman"? 3. What about ordinary people (who happen to be involved in historical events) that have wikipedia entries, like George Floyd? Should he be assigned something like `person/George Floyd`? If so, should the two Francis Bacons be assigned `person/philosopher/Francis Bacon` and `person/artist/Francis Bacon` instead? And so on
- dgb23 3y ago
  That’s exactly right. And this is not just a “mental anguish” or “skill issue”. It’s a fundamental issue: Hierarchical naming and categorization sucks. In 95% of the cases, you want sets or even graphs rather than trees. You _might_ be getting away with trees, because you didn’t encounter a case where the hierarchy breaks. But you’re being fooled by happenstance. In the 5% of cases where trees are fine, you could also use sets or graphs. This issue comes up all the time with all sorts of things, including urls and file structure. The trick is to have a general “/type/name” format and to be as liberal and general as possible with what “type” means.
ttctciyf 3y ago
Practically speaking, when you want to link to the latter in a markdown that already utilises parens, you encounter more friction - cutting and pasting a url with parens from the address bar needs manual correction if used to create a link in (say) reddit's markdown syntax. I realise this is somewhat tangential to your point, but shows how easy it is for innocent looking choices to end up creating annoyances.

What's the difference between /Wheel of Time /TV Series/Wheel of Time /Video Game/Wheel of Time and /Wheel of Time /Wheel of Time (TV Series) /Wheel of Time (Video Game)

Terr_ 3y ago

Yeah, the non-flat hierarchy/tagging may be informal, but it still exists. (And for good reason.)

dgb23 3y ago

I like the second one better. In programming, it’s useful to have namespaces for overall organization and conflict resolution. But it’s a trade off: you are nudged into a hierarchical ontology, with all the implied issues. Wikipedia titles are free text (more or less). So they can afford not to introduce hierarchical naming and still have nice, easily addressable names without conflicts. This avoids all sorts of problems. Most things simply can’t be categorized in a strict, hierarchical manner.

aragonite 3y ago

I'd argue that "mental anguish" is probably less of a problem on the latter design, since the additional parenthetical material is used pure for disambiguation (and so is optional), not for categorization. So, on the latter design we can have: /Francis Bacon /Francis Bacon (artist) without having to answer anguish-inducing questions that would be raised by /Francis Bacon /artist/Francis Bacon e.g. questions such as: 1. "Maybe we should put Lord Bacon under a category also, maybe `philosopher/Francis Bacon`" 2. "But he's also a statesman ... what about `statesman/Francis Bacon`? Is he more of a philosopher or a statesman"? 3. What about ordinary people (who happen to be involved in historical events) that have wikipedia entries, like George Floyd? Should he be assigned something like `person/George Floyd`? If so, should the two Francis Bacons be assigned `person/philosopher/Francis Bacon` and `person/artist/Francis Bacon` instead? And so on

dgb23 3y ago
That’s exactly right. And this is not just a “mental anguish” or “skill issue”. It’s a fundamental issue: Hierarchical naming and categorization sucks. In 95% of the cases, you want sets or even graphs rather than trees. You _might_ be getting away with trees, because you didn’t encounter a case where the hierarchy breaks. But you’re being fooled by happenstance. In the 5% of cases where trees are fine, you could also use sets or graphs. This issue comes up all the time with all sorts of things, including urls and file structure. The trick is to have a general “/type/name” format and to be as liberal and general as possible with what “type” means.

ttctciyf 3y ago

Practically speaking, when you want to link to the latter in a markdown that already utilises parens, you encounter more friction - cutting and pasting a url with parens from the address bar needs manual correction if used to create a link in (say) reddit's markdown syntax. I realise this is somewhat tangential to your point, but shows how easy it is for innocent looking choices to end up creating annoyances.