How are Wikipedia subcategories meant, semantically?

Question

Let's have a look at the category

Theresa May is not in it. So let's see:

So those categories seem to be inclusive: the items of a subcategory are thought to be in the parent category as well.

However, then we have the following problem:

Uh, so this means that the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election is a British politician too?

So there seem to be two kinds of "subcategory relations":

this category is a subcategory, all its items belong to the parent category (Theresa May --> British politician)
this category is just related to that parent category (2019 election --> Theresa May)

Is that just messy, or am I missing something to distinguish between the two types?

I don't believe you are missing anything, it is messy like that. The categories are not a proper ontology. — Ainali, Oct 06 '20 at 15:19
This is due to the fact that categories are annotated in article pages. I don't think that adding a category to a category page results in the super-category being added in all the sub-category pages. There are bots that do services of this kind on Wikipedia, but I'd love to see a systemic and up-to-date review of what bots are actually running. — mapto, Oct 08 '20 at 10:31
@mapto Can you please elaborate on "I don't think that adding a category to a category page results in the super-category being added in all the sub-category pages." ? Not sure I understand. Is that explained in detail somewhere? — Jonas Sourlier, Oct 14 '20 at 10:19
You can edit WIkipedia and change it, or propose that change. You can also change items in Wikidata. WIkidata is used in creating the infoboxes on Wikipedia pages. — knb, Oct 17 '20 at 18:15

0 Answers0