[Sigia-l] mixing apples and oranges and tomatoes s

[Andrew Otwell]

>f users encounter redundancy wouldn't that confuse them and
>hinder their attempts to figure out what features make something a member
>of one category and then where to look for the item that they want?

Bah. We encounter redundancies every day in real life and have 
learned to handle them fine. I think we're over-thinking how much 
overt consideration people (other than us) give to the purity of 
categorization schemes.

>(Keep
>in mind I'm not talking about some sort of forced learning of a taxonomy,
>but the sort that we naturally do everyday when meeting new concepts and
>sorting them into our own taxonomy of knowledge.)

Exactly. Doesn't this answer your own question above? Our "personal 
taxonomies" would probably look like some seriously messy file 
structures if you wrote them down: weird links all over the place, 
aliases to things that jog our memories, broken links and missing 
files, stuff in multiple categories or wrong categories. Much more 
chaotic than any website.

>  I know this is forcing it to the absurd, but, at
>some point you would have every item under every category because someone
>at some point might look for it there.

Well, now you're talking!

Every item doesn't belong in every category, but this is sort of the 
approach that facets take. Besides things don't *really* have to be 
in every category in the database as long as you can *display* them 
in an ordered and understandable way.

ao