Category talk:AIDS

[discussion on the extra cats copied from Village pump archive:

Cool stuff, seems like the Whitehouse is very intested in open knowledge... Otherwise I cannot explain how come Category:AIDS being a subcategory of Category:Homosexuality. --190.48.106.137 14:59, 8 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, dealing with AIDS is an important aspect of gay culture, no? It is, of course, also an important aspect of health care and education in general, especially in third world countries but also in the "first"; and it's a mojor problem for herion addicts. Now, why should AIDS not be associated with homosexuality? -- Duesentrieb^(?!) 15:15, 8 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Because it is not exclusive. Hetrasexuals can get it too. --GW Simulations 16:11, 8 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sure - add it to more categories -- Duesentrieb^(?!) 18:35, 8 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I removed this wrong cat, every single human in the world regardless of sexual practice may get this disease (although several groups want us to believe it is directly related to homosexuality). Another thing : Why HIV and AIDS cats ? --Denniss 17:44, 8 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Formally speaking, many people such as Denniss believe that categories represent only IS_A relations. Others, such as Duesentrieb and myself feel that the strict hierarchies that this imposes cannot express the rich set of semantic relationships in human knowledge. One such relation is "Is_Part_of" relations. People who interpreted the Aids-Homosexuality relation as an IS_A relationship interpreted it as meaning "anyone that has aids IS homosexual", a statement that nearly all people contributing to the wikis knows is incorrect. People who were not offended by it understood it to mean that Aids IS_Part_Of the set of subjects of relevance to the Subject Homosexuality. And it is, as was Duesentrieb's point that it could and should be added to all subjects like African issues, intravenous drug injection or sexual promiscuity.

It is a curiousity that there is no clear common understanding about what the category tree represents. Nonetheless, the opposing positions may be evaluated at a practical level rather than a theoretical level.

• Position IS_A: makes it more difficult for people suffering from aids to find information about other issues of interest to the homosexual community.

• Position IS_PART_OF: makes it easier to find more information on subjects related to Aids, such as the heavy impact it has on Africa, it's relationship to recreational inject able drug use etc.

If we treat the category tree strictly as a set of mutually exclusive sets, we are going to come up fast on the realization that the world does not obey such a tidy way of understanding the world. And we will perpetuate ignorance about important issues such as Aids because we refuse to encode the relationships that are non hierarchical.

-Mak 22:17, 8 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I am one of those people who have always considered categories to represent semantic relationships, as opposed a strict hierarchy. I agree with you, Mak, I don't see how such a view would hurt. But perhaps, we should state this explicitly in a master category scheme — much of the categorization intructions are poorly documented, so I am considering to publicize it more. Hopefully, people will even read such schemes — but I might be a little too hopeful. —UED77 16:56, 9 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And another related thought: perhaps... the name "category web" should be promoted instead of "category tree". Consider the advantages... as long as it doesn't get excessive. —UED77 17:01, 9 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The silence regarding the fundamental nature of the primary reference structure of Commons is not unexpected.

AIDS is now a subcat of African Politics because with 234 African deaths this hour due to AIDS, it IS_PART_OF the set of African political social issues. Of course other cats may treat the AIDS cat like a leper, and in so doing be part of the deadly cycle of perpetuating ignorance. -Mak 16:45, 9 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

AIDS is now a subcat of Recreational drug use since it is part of the issues that intraveneous drug users ought to be aware of. Betcha can't guess what I'll make it a subcat of next.... -Mak 20:12, 10 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I get around the problem of intersecting sets by adding "See also" lks, just like WP. This is less organisationally satisfying, but means the user who is looking for African AIDS pics doesn't arrive at Cat:AIDS and wonder why most of the pics aren't about Africa. It is clear these are related sets, not nested sets.

There is a language issue, of course, but a) I don't have any difficulty understanding structures like this on pages where I don't understand the language, and b) if we're really bothered perhaps we could do a language template thing which displays in the user's preferred lang. JackyR 21:12, 10 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's an interesting thought. You mean it might be useful to be able to transclude link information that would relate a topic to other related topics? Maybe someone has proposed that Commons allow such a mechanism to be included on pages. Hmmmm. After thinking about it a little bit, I believe I agree with you. Many of these relationships are best expressed in links.

Still, it seems to me that there should be some common agreement on general fundamentals about the nature of the category tree- such as whether it is or is not to be regarded as a "tree" (a strict hierarchy), or something else. -Mak 22:56, 10 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hey- all those that think Aids is not an African Political problem, please join Denniss in reverting that subcat, as well as the one for recreational drugs. -Mak 23:10, 10 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think the above discussion demonstrates very clearly that Commons will be more useful as a web, not a tree. Tree structures are nice logically, but don't reflect the real world very well. We don't attempt to build WP like that, and at Commons we use categories the way WP uses articles (to some extent). So both vertical categorising and horizontal linking have their uses. JackyR 17:21, 11 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

PS You can see one I prepared earlier at Category:Stoves. I'm not sure about the layout, but the cross-linking works well in this topic. JackyR 17:27, 11 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

PPS Don't know that I'm into transcluded info: what's wrong with ordinary lks. No, I meant that the "See also" appears in the language of the user's choice (isn't that what folk have been working on for other bits of text?). JackyR 09:03, 12 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. Folks are interested in it, but no show so far. Transclusion is good because that way you can do the navigation not just from category or article pages, but directly from each image page. You can do stuff like for navigation- take me to the next image in this category, take me to the next decade, or back a decade--- or what is discussed here- take me to an associated category that is not closely enough associated to stick in the Category web. Why should the nodes in your graph be the categories or the articles? They should instead be the basic retrieval unit of Commons: The Image: page. Each transcluded info page adds an additional set of edges from that image node to the graph. The aggregate of those edges make the node unique. -Mak 21:44, 12 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If people want to keep confusing AIDS with HIV I think this category should be merged with Category:HIV. Alternatively this category should only be used for images displaying or depicting the symptoms and infections, which probably isn't pretty, but what can you do. --Lakefall 18:52, 23 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]