Chris Johnson wrote:
> On Nov 14, 2007 7:05 PM, Hans Salvisberg wrote
>> The problem is that everyone intuitively knows what
a category is.
>>
>> If you have a term "dog" and you tag a
post with "dog", then that post goes
>> into the category "dog". That's the
common sense non-technical meaning of
>> "category". You can even stretch that to
include terms like "Gamer's Forum"
>> -- a post in the Gamer's Forum goes into the
category "Gamer's Forum".
>> That's what classification is all about, putting
things into categories.
>>
>> Using "category" for anything else but
for terms will just not work for
>> normal people without re-educating them about what
that common word means.
>> IOW, it will not work.
>>
>>
>> Now, what's that thing in between -- the
"animals" and the "forums" -- in
>> plain English? Go ask the man in the street:
>> If you have categories like "dog",
"bird", and "elephant", then what would
>> you call that /group of categories/? Answer:
"animals"
>>
>
> They may know it intuitively, but at just what level
does it apply?
>
> Why would "dog" be the category? To me, the
category (the container)
> is "animals" -- and "dog" and
"bird" are things, or instances of
> things which go into the category "animals".
>
> English is flexible that way -- we are actually both
right. And thus,
> we don't know what any particular user is going to
think when they see
> the word "categories". Are they going to
think animals, plants and
> minerals? Or dogs, birds and elephants?
>
I didn't plan to prolong this discussion, but since you
addressed me
directly, I'll take one last shot. The answer to why
"dog" is the
category (IMHO) is in line 2 of the text you quoted.
In your reasoning "dog" and "bird" are
the leaves of the tree. That's
the point of view of the person who manages the taxonomy.
However, IMO, the webmaster (and consequently we, too)
should take the
point of view of the site *user*. For the user, the leaves
are the
posts, and posts can go into or be found in the /category/
"dog", or
"bird", or maybe they don't fit into any of the
"animals" /group of
categories/.
Actually, I sympathize with your point of view, and I agree
that it's a
noble cause to educate the webmasters about taxonomy. BUT
many would
rather just set up their website, and they certainly don't
want to be
put in a position where they need to explain geeky
terminology to their
users!
-1 to reverting /Categories/ back to /Taxonomy/!
I take a special interest in the Subscriptions module, and
this may
illuminate the scene a bit: Subscriptions offers various
ways to request
notifications about new content:
-- replies and comments to a single node (threads)
-- content types
-- categories
-- etc.
The subscriptions page has one subpage (tab) for each of
these. Let's
look at the "categories" (subscriptions/taxa)
subpage: in Subscriptions
1.x it's just a list of all terms; I don't remember whether
they're
ordered by vocabulary or not. So, it may look like this
(with checkboxes
to subscribe):
[ ] Dog Lovers
[ ] Other Lovers
[ ] Tree Lovers
[ ] bird
[ ] dog
[ ] elephant
[ ] Paris
[ ] Rome
[ ] New York
I had a hard time explaining to my users how this list came
to be and
why it was called "categories," and most of them
didn't try hard enough
to understand... That was an understatement -- I can't
remember a single
one who tried hard enough...
Karoly redesigned this subpage for the upcoming
Subscriptions 2.0 and
it's now a list of fieldsets, one for each vocabulary,
containing the
terms in that vocabulary. So, it might now look like this:
+--- Forums ----
| [ ] Dog Lovers
| [ ] Tree Lovers
| [ ] Other Lovers
+----------------
+--- Animals ----
| [ ] bird
| [ ] dog
| [ ] elephant
+----------------
+--- Image Galleries ---
| [ ] Paris
| [ ] Rome
| [ ] New York
+------------------
Now it all falls into place! We (as site users) see
categories that
contain posts, and there are different groups of categories
serving
different categorization schemes. So now, under the heading
"categories," we subscribe to /categories/ of
posts. That's pretty
intuitive...
For the terminology, when I look at this, I can't help
coming back to
term -> category
vocabulary -> category group
taxonomy -> categories (nice fit; maybe somewhat
ambiguous, but only
until the dust settles) or classification
And no, I don't think we need to rename function names and
paths.
Educating everyone (who wants to know) about taxonomy is
still a worthy
goal, just don't force it upon the users and the newbie
webmasters. --
The "node" is a well-kept secret, we could do the
same for taxonomy.
I certainly don't mean to say that Drupal terminology should
be adjusted
just to fit one contrib module, but this is where I'm coming
from. Feel
free to bring your own use case and let's try to look at
concrete usage
rather than theoretical preferences.
P.S. Don't try Subscriptions 5.x-2.x-dev just yet -- it's
still under
construction.
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