Most pages in Arbital can be connected. We call these connections relationships. Parent-child relationship is one of the multiple relationship types and is the tightest way to connect pages on Arbital. This relationship is used to indicate that the child is a critical component of the parent, or that the parent is the sum of its children. For example, the [SI_units SI units] parent page will have [kilogram], [second], [meter], etc… as children pages.
It's perfectly fine for a page not to have any parents or children. It can still be found by searching, and can be used as a tag, requisite, or link.
When to create a parent-child relationship
When the child doesn't make sense outside of the context of the parent. For example:
- Chapter 2 of "Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone" doesn't make a lot of sense by itself. So it's a child of "Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone (book)" page, which is itself a child of "Harry Potter (book series)" page.
When there is some well-known, established hierarchy. For example:
- "C. lupus (species)", or commonly known as gray wolf, is a child of the "Canis (genus)" page, which is a child of "Canidae (family)" page, etc… This taxonomy of biological organisms is pretty well established.
When the parent is defined as the sum of some parts. For example:
- Arithmetic is addition, subtraction, multiplication and division by definition. So "Arithmetic" page will have those pages as children.
More generally the parent-child relationship suggest a "is-a" or a "is-a-part-of" connetion. Sometimes it's also simply used for organizing pages in a hierarchy to make it easier to find them.
When not to create a parent-child relationships
Just because two concepts are often associated. For example:
- Chlorophyll, an important biomolecule used for photosynthesis, is usually associated with plants. But not all plants have chlorophyll, and chlorophyll can occur outside of plants, e.g. in algae.
Just because two concepts are closely related. For example:
- Plants, chlorophyll, and photosynthesis are pretty closely related. But photosynthesis as a process can happen in things other than plants or using a mechanism that doesn't involve chlorophyll. And some plants don't even have chlorophyll.
Sometimes it can be unclear if the pages should have a parent-child relationship. If you run into a case you can't clearly resolve, please post it here, so we can discuss it, learn from it, and refine these definitions.
Comments
Eric Bruylant
This gives a few clear examples, but does not help much with slightly less clear judgements (e.g. should Nick Bostrom be a child of People or just tagged with it?). Classification systems are tricky and often subjective, probably worth taking a close look at Wikidata and other similar projects for inspiration when we want to work out detailed guidelines for this.
Alexei Andreev
Child, because "Nick Bostrom is a person" and "Nick is a part of the 'people' object" and without "Nick Bostrom" the object "people" is not complete.
You'd add the tag "People" if the page talks about that concept, eg a page about people of New York.
Eric Bruylant
If applied to all "is a" statements, some pages are going to have a lot of parents eventually. This is probably fine, but worth coming back to and reconsidering once we've seen the system in widespread use imo.
Dil Green
This matter of linkages is crucial. The discussion above seems vague.
To be clear - a 'Tree' inheritance diagram can only map simplistic domains.
To be useful in 'useful to humans' domains - governance, economics, science (let alone politics, art, philosophy), we must be able to map any connection at all: - "A City is not a Tree".
I understand that Arbital is math focused - math is a simplistic domain - one where proof is a binary and immutable condition - and yet a single 'proof' can be related to multiple domains (both 'upwards' and 'downwards').
So I may be in the wrong place. I'd like to know if this is the case.
PS: Based on this quote that popped up; "Truth is singular, its versions are mistruths", I may indeed be in the wrong place. Or Truths is a rather small set, that is mostly full of banalities (at least, once identified and accepted).