On Thu, 8 Feb 2007 21:09:37 +0200, "Cool Cat" <wikipedia.kawaii.neko(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yup. And it's not necessary to have 123,748 cats for every possible variation thereof. Oh: Methylated Wesletarian - my dad made that up to describe a rather unsuccessful Origami model of a church :o) Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On Thu, 8 Feb 2007 21:16:49 +0200, "Cool Cat" <wikipedia.kawaii.neko(a)gmail.com> wrote: No way forward other than to gain consensus. Without a solid body of the community behind the change you will be accused of robbing people of their Jewish / black / gay / unicyclist identity. Quite how removing a cat from a Wikipedia article robs someone of their identity I don't know, but that is what is asserted. First stop the Village Pump, I guess. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote: While it's easy to agree that there are a lot of useless and lame categories, it's also the case that campaigns to purge these categories do more to create friction than to solve problems. With patience those with an identity crisis will eventually go away at which time the pointless categories can be removed without much fuss. BTW, Methylated Wesletarian (who are dead) need to be distinguished from Ethylated Wesletarians, who are merely drunk. This must be divided into two categories. :-) Ec

Based on this discussion I wrote an Essay, feel free to comment/expand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Do_not_write_articles_using_categori… -Cool Cat On 2/9/07, stvrtg <stvrtg(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 2/11/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: But what is excessive? Since you have very little idea exactly what groupings people will be looking for I would tend to argue that it is worth risking a little over categorisation. -- geni

on 2/12/07 6:19 AM, Cool Cat at wikipedia.kawaii.neko(a)gmail.com wrote: Sounds like a great idea. I'd be one of the first in line to sign on. Marc Riddell -- If you're restricted to what is - you are cut off from - - what could be.

geni wrote: Do you know, Geni, that sometimes you project a fairly abrasive attitude? -Rich

You know... The actual problem does not involve administrative categories at all. Obviously those would be an exception. Stub wikiproject would take care of stub categories as well. Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy after all. I believe stub wikiproject is a great success and not a bunch of busy bodies. If a similar categorization wikiproject started off, end results would be only positive. The scope of the wikiproject should only include non-administrative categories intended for items on the article namespace. Geni how does that sound? - Cool Cat On 2/12/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 12/02/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: I would think in the *normal* case they'd have considerable *influence* at CFD. That is: "I'm from WikiProject Foo. We discussed at [[discussion page]] killing these cats, for x reason, to be replaced with these cats." Are there notable cases where the collective wisdom of CFD has said "keep" in a manner that doesn't seem to make sense? - d.

on 2/12/07 10:29 AM, geni at geniice(a)gmail.com wrote: Whatever it takes. At any rate, I think the entire Categorization System in WP needs reevaluated. It appears to have turned into whatever any individual thinks it should be. To be most effective, this undertaking would require a formal proposal with agreed upon goals, and a specific group of persons to take it on. Marc

on 2/12/07 11:02 AM, geni at geniice(a)gmail.com wrote: I definitely agree there. You would have to go a far way to find someone less bureaucratic-thinking than me. What I am suggesting is that, like any system that's been around for a while, we take an objective step back to see how it has evolved over time. Is it still accomplishing the goals that were originally set? Has the system kept pace with the growth of the project? Things like that. Marc

Cool Cat wrote: Frankly, I don't see what's "not working" about the current approach. There are a heck of a lot of categories, some of them highly specific, but it remains to be proven to me how this is actually a _problem_. It may be that we have different opinions on what the category system should be used for. But real-world usage has developed to the state it is today through a large-scale broad-based process of mass editing, and I suspect an attempt to forcibly wrench it into a different mold is likely to run into a lot of trouble as a result.

Cool Cat wrote: I don't understand. The content of articles and the content of categories are both established "by consensus" in the sense that anyone can edit them, argue about their contents on various talk pages, etc. The existence or nonexistence of articles is decided by their respective fD processes - AfD for the articles, CfD for the categories. I'm not seeing a fundamental difference here, and I don't see how articles should be based on someone's belief system (I'm not even sure what that means). The biggest difference I can think of is purely technical - categories can't be renamed or redirected, so it requires a lot of bot busywork to shuffle things around. I can't think of a way to fix this by non-technical means, though I have occasionally moved the contents of small categories around "manually" without bothering CfD about it. How does it imply that? There are other options than just "vegetarian" and "carnivore", I'm an omnivore myself. And what does nationality have to do with it? Wouldn't the same issue exist with just plain [[Category:Vegetarians]]? I see nothing problematic about [[category:Terrorists by nationality]] that isn't already inherent in having a separate [[Category:Terrorists]] and [[Category:People by nationality]]. Once one has determined (by whatever means) that someone is both a "terrorist" and an "Elbonian", what problems arise from putting them into "[[Category:Elbonian terrorists]]"?

Wikiprojects often do not know the categorization syntax we use, and some of them are rather biased. We should let a group of unbiased people to take care of categories. The point of categories is to be effective navigation aids, nothing else. - Cool Cat On 2/12/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 2/11/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: Please demonstrate some harm caused by having "excessive" categories on an article. Assume that all the categories are correctly used: the article belongs to the category, and none of the categories are mutually redundant. Steve

geni wrote: By this standard there are also far too many interwiki links for this article. We should get rid of some. :) On a serious note, though, I happen to use the Classic skin as my default and I don't have any problem with this at all. If this sort of thing _was_ sufficiently annoying to me I could put "#catlinks {display:none}" in my custom CSS like what I did to get rid of the stub templates, or just switch to one of the other skins that puts the catlinks at the bottom. Wikipedia's display format is highly configurable so I don't consider this to be a paprticularly strong example of "harm".

On 14/02/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: It would be useful if there were preference switches for what one wanted to see, i.e. "Don't show: [ ] article categories [ ] stub messages ...", and so on, a la the kind of display configuration you get on Slashdot and similar sites, that would set user CSS appropriately. While technical users such as ourselves may be comfortable with editing CSS files, many other users are not. -- Earle Martin http://downlode.org/ http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/

I guess I am taking things for granted too fast... Any recent US president has way too many categories. They are merely the example symptoms of the problem. Getting rid of some of these excess categories is something hard to do. Of course this isn't a battle, but people are often emotionally motivated on a number of topics and they sometimes create categories for that end. Especially if a person does not understands the spirit of NPOV, we end up having categories with not very objective titles and a subjective inclusion criteria. An average cfd discussions get very little attention unless it is on a controversial issue. In your average cfd on a potentially controversial issue, people tend to vote based on their belief system and not based on stuff like usefulness/objectivity/subjectivity of the inclusion criteria of the category in question. For example, although a word to avoid, [[Category:Terrorists by nationality]] has been around for quite sometime. - Cool Cat On 2/13/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Cool Cat wrote: But what exactly is "too many categories"? _Why_ is that number of categories "too many"? The only times I can recall encountering articles and thinking "this article has too many categories" it was because the article was redundantly categorized, not because of just the raw number. Categories with bad titles or inclusion criteria should be renamed or deleted, true, but this is a separate issue from how many categories in total there are. I've just read a bunch of the CfDs in this area (I'm sure you have too since you initiated several of them, but for the benefit of other editors see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Terrorists>) and I'm wondering how you're determining whose "votes" are based on their belief systems and whose are based on usefulness/etc. I've seen several opinions supporting keeping the category that appear to me to be based on usefulness etc. But we seem to be straying from the original subject here, which is the "too many categories" thing. Or are you suggesting that the reason we have too many categories is because it's too hard to delete them via existing mechanisms? If so, it looks like the old deletionism/inclusionism dilemma transported to another namespace.

True, but waiting makes things worse. Similar categories are morphed because the category exists. In that sense we do have a deadline. Maybe a "Wikiproject Categorization" would be a better solution... Any opinions? Does such a wikiproject exist? - Cool Cat On 2/9/07, Bryan Derksen &lt;bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca&gt; wrote: