K P wrote:
You need a librarian for this. We're trying to do
everything for free and
voluntary at Wikipedia, but categorizing things requires an overarching
scheme and Wikipedia is implemented and run to prevent just this.
True enough. I sometimes think that some of our categorizers get so
caught up in the process that they forget why we categorize in the first
place. When categories are either too broad or too narrow their
usefulness becomes limited.
I had a number of group programming assingments in
school (long ago), and
one woman in the class was a reject for all groups, as she was a lousy
programmer. I let her be in our group, figuring she couldn't harm my
programs. Turns out she was a librarian, and when it came to writing
databases we kicked everyone else's butts. It always seemed so easy after
she organized everything, but there is no way I have the skills to do what
she did, because she understood how categories work--and she knew that you
had to start at the top (all the programmers here are thinking, of couse,
that in those days that was what programmers were supposed to do, too), and
she knew where to place the top.
An enlightening parable! Perhaps today's programmers attach too much
importance to their own code bits. As with many ventures it requires
taking a step back so that one can see the big picture.
Nobody on Wikipedia or Wikimedia even knows what
categories are, much less
how they work, as far as I can tell. Set theory? Probably no one
understands that either.
"Nobody" is a somewhat harsh judgement. Those that do see the problem
just give up fighting with those obsessed with their own little corner
of categories. The set theory analogy is interesting. One needs to
make the distinction between a set of elements, and a set of subsets
which each have one element.
Ec