Template talk:Subcategories inherit

What is the point of this? Shouldn't all subcategories of a category contain articles which are valid members of it? ··gracefool |&#9786; 11:42, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Not all do. For example, Category:Jupiter's moons is a subcategory of Category:Jupiter which is a subcategory of Category:Sol System planets, but the moons of Jupiter are not themselves Sol System planets. At some point in that category chain there's a link that's not as simple as "is-a" any more.


 * That said, it doesn't look like my experiment with these templates took off. Hopefully there will eventually be some sort of mechanism for clarifying these relationships on a subcategory-by-subcategory basis. Bryan 15:26, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Categorization doesn't say anything about "is a" relationships. Categories are merely collections of related articles, and subcategories are subsets of those articles. ··gracefool |&#9786; 22:39, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Some categories are effectively is-a, however. For example most of the subcategories of Category:People are is-a. My intention was to provide a framework for labelling these clearly, so that it would be simpler to determine how to aggregate them if necessary. Categorization does discuss this kind of division, just not by the is-a name; "A few categories do only merely subdivide their parent category" is an example of an is-a type of relationship.
 * Anyway, this is all moot. This template was created by me as a proposal back when Categories were new, and as can be seen in the what-links-here it never took off. It was a bit of an ugly hack so I'm not too surprised. I'm hoping that there will be more convenient ways of indicating relationship types introduced in future versions of WikiMedia. Bryan 00:26, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)