[Debtags-devel] Proposed Debtags goals for Etch

[Enrico Zini]

On Sun, Jul 24, 2005 at 07:41:11PM +0200, Erich Schubert wrote:

> > Eric, I'm tired of such jokes of yours.  I'm spending hours (HOURS,
> > damnit, HOURS, you realise that?) explaining you things in different
> > ways just to get you to ignore all of my messages and answer with a
> Maybe you just need to realize that I disagree with your point of view.

I realised it since quite a while.  Now, could you please let me know
that you at least understand it?  What I really care is not that we all
agree, but that we all at least can see where we are currently going,
even if we all would like to go in some different direction.


> > can't make a good hierarchy out of tags in many cases.  Give me an
> > example good hierarchy of the tags in the 'culture' facet, for example.
> culture::western
> culture::western::italian
> culture::asian
> culture::asian
> culture:.asian::chinese
> What's bad about this hierarchy?

Please go on, I'm curious:

 - do you put 'hebrew' in culture::middle-east?
 - do you put 'turkish' in culture::western or culture::middle-east?
 - do you put 'iraq' in culture::western or culture::middle-east, now
   that they are a colony of USA?
 - where do you put 'rom'?
 - would you put 'arabic' in middle-east?  And how about Moroccans and
   Tunisians?
 - would 'spanish' be western?  And how about much of south america?
 - as an Italian I feel much more mediterranean than western.  Our
   culture has much more in common with Spain and Greece than it has
   with USA or UK.
 - is Czech Republic western or eastern-europe?

It's easy to start a hierarchy, much less so to make it model the real
world without forcing the real world to fit in the hierarchy.

In some case, maybe with file formats, you can do this forcing.  In
other cases, this forcing will result in imposing your point of view,
stereotypes and preconceptions over other people.  This is a risk when
doing categorization, and I'd like to do all I can to avoid it.


Ciao,

Enrico

--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico at enricozini.org>
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