on 4/29/07 10:38 AM, John Lee at johnleemk(a)gmail.com wrote: I agree with you completely, John. It's just that the present state of the Category system is completely out of control. The existing Policies on Categorization have become more complicated than the U.S. Tax Code; and, those that can be deciphered are being completely ignored. I, for one, am not sure how much more cerebral RAM and emotional energy I want to spend on this. Marc Riddell

On 29/04/07, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gmail.com> wrote: People are actively working on this. (The problem is that MySQL sucks.) - d.

On 29/04/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: I find this a most seductive prospect. - d.

On Apr 29, 2007, at 4:35 PM, Andrew Gray wrote: FWIW, I'm unconvinced we do that badly at this. (And I'm actually a recent convert - playing around with Catfishing has made me suspect that the categories are better organized than I'd previously assumed) Let's look at [[Peter Pan]] (Randomly chosen). 8 categories. Children's Novels, J.M. Barrie Plays, Peter Pan, British children's literature, fantasy novels - all obvious choices. Literature protagonists is the only ridiculously broad one, being a category that should contain one article for every piece of narrative literature ever published. It's not useless as such, but it needs a refocus. Literature featuring anthropomorphic characters, fictional characters who can fly, Kingdom Hearts characters - all three fall into a border zone - they're interesting to some people, could be used well by some people, but are probably a bit esoteric. Their flaw is not that they don't belong, but rather that they're on a threshhold of usefulness that if we took everything from that level of usefulness we'd flood the article. There are a few categories I'd still love to kill - the birth/death years are the biggest. But most of them serve some purpose. The problem, as I see it, is primarily implementation - the fact that categories are attributes of articles, and so every category must appear on the article. To my mind, categories are most preferable as replacements for the old "list of X" articles - navigational tools that work well on their own. But instead they're enormously difficult to change, requiring editing of hundreds of articles for a large category. If categories could be moved to their own, independent existence and if a decent interface for the article side of things could be devised we'd have something that is very close to a useful system. -Phil

On 4/29/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: Getting involved in categories is not the way. KP

Much better would be a recursive category view - I'm sure the devs will get there eventually, we just need to give them time. Placing articles in every level of the hierarchy means the top levels are too big to be useful.

I'm not convinced there is a non-technical solution, though. What we have at the moment doesn't work, certainly, but is there anything better?

On 4/29/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: One of the problems in this instance, imo, is the complexity of the issue. Just look at this response to my comments: * How many people nodded sagely and said, of course, no need to state the obvious to this comment of Ec's? Probably nobody is a little harsh, but having struggled to figure out what they think they're doing versus what they're actually doing with categories on En.Wikipedia and Wikipedia Commons, it's very obvious that nobody is not all that harsh, and a few comments about "oh, we're working with sets of subsets, not .of elements," would have gone a long way. Set theory is deceptively simple and powerful, and the type of organization that people like librarians, and one would hope data base designers (implementation, not coding), do is simply not something that lends itself to inexperienced group think. Not everything Wikipedia is attempting to do, be, and provide, can be had for the efforts of a bunch of volunteers. Having seen it in action, I'm in awe of the type of insight into organization and categorization done by people who organize data for a living. IMO, as long as we have the mentality that the problem with categories can be solved just like everything else has been solved on Wikipedia categorization will be a failure. This needs a dedicated professional for something this huge, and probably more than one. I don't see anything but wasting time in CfD, categories, and etc., all over Wiki space, until something is put in order with categories. KP

On Apr 29, 2007, at 6:54 PM, Marc Riddell wrote: Voilà: [[Category:Wikipedian librarians]] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedian_librarians -- Jossi

On Apr 29, 2007, at 7:17 PM, Marc Riddell wrote: You can also check who links to this userbox: {{user degree/MLIS}} MLIS This user has a Master of Library and Information Science degree. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/ Template:User_degree/MLIS tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/yqrq6m -- Jossi

On Apr 29, 2007, at 4:43 PM, Marc Riddell wrote: That is $64,000 question. Just check what happened to a group of well meaning editors that worked for months on [[WP:ATT]]. There is no such process in place, and as we grow, it will become more and more difficult to change the status quo. -- Jossi

On 4/30/07, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih(a)gmail.com> wrote: Dude, that things was awesome. It does definitely show the intricate levels of nesting there are in every damn category. I never had any idea that "International Academies" was a super-category of "Sweden" (by five steps, but still!) --Oskar

on 4/29/07 11:46 PM, John Lee at johnleemk(a)gmail.com wrote: John, In my work I have access to a database of thousands of case studies of persons who have been formally treated for various psychosocial disorders. The information does not include personal identification materials, just age, gender and other demographics, plus their diagnosis, course of treatment and outcome. In each record there is a list of identifying codes. If the person's primary diagnosis was chemical dependency, the (main) code for this is entered; if that person's primary chemical of use was cocaine, the (sub) code for this is also entered, etc. Now, if I want to call up all cases of chemical dependency, I enter its code and I have a list of these cases to study. If I want only those cases where the primary chemical of use was cocaine, I would enter that code. For this to work, BOTH the main and sub codes must be entered in each case. This is what I am asking for in WP. That is why both the main and sub categories need to be entered into each Article. As for the countless number of ridiculous Categories that now exist in WP, I believe this needs to be controlled by making it more difficult to create Categories. There is a whole "Categories for Deletion" process that must take place to get rid of a Category, but absolutely none to create one. Huh!?! I believe there needs to be a major overhaul of the Category System in WP, and who better to do it than professional librarians who work with this stuff all of the time (and actually know what they are doing and why). To this end, I hope some of the WP Users who are professional librarians will come forward to take on this daunting challenge. Marc

on 4/30/07 9:22 AM, John Lee at johnleemk(a)gmail.com wrote: I agree with you John, that part is, most likely, a software problem. Perhaps I'm being unnecessarily repetitive here, but I'm just trying to drive home a point. I'm with you. At this moment, I'm drafting a message (actually a plea) to the members of the "WikiProject Librarians" to solicit their help. We'll seeŠ Marc

Tracy, Your point is very well made. The difference I see in our searches is that you want to exclude a certain set of data, and mine is geared toward including a certain set of data. This may very well be a matter of software, which is an area I know absolutely nothing about. My solution of including both main & sub categories in the same Article is based on what I understand about the process - which is about as elementary as it gets. In fact, I am open to any solution that meets the needs I cited above. Marc

on 4/30/07 12:19 PM, Tracy Poff at tracy.poff(a)gmail.com wrote: Tracy, Thanks for all of this. I am encouraged by some mutterings from others that some software changes are being considered. How high a priority they are being given is another issue. I've learned a lot here. Marc

Andrew Gray wrote: That's well said. Another way to tackle this might to ask a different question. "What are categories," seems better suited for a philosophy seminar. We might get more useful answers if we ask, "What can people use categories to do?" With a list like that, we can figure out which uses we'd like to support, and from there I'd expect the argument over which system to use would be much easier. William

On 4/29/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: Why do people always suggest the most drastic solutions first? If the problem is the policy being too complex than altering it should be a start. Write an alternative and campaign to have the existing one replaced. Policies are going to be complex, English Wikipedia is just too large to be simple. I want to know what specifically is wrong with the current policies. Mgm

I think most people would agree that the category system is cumbersome, but it replaced to earlier systems of classification that were even worse. I'm a librarian, and Im going to answer on the page mentioned. In my opinion, summarizing, no commonly used existing universal classification scheme is suitable for WP, and developing a new one is an inordinate amount of work. Rewriting the database to adapt to one will be even harder. Perhaps the best approach is simply a better search engine. ~~~~ On 4/30/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.

On 5/1/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: You might look at dbpedia.org for research etc. I don't think what you want will really be possible without a little bit of structured data. It's not super usable yet unless you know SPARQL (like SQL sorta) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL but it works. The data is always going to be a little messy of course, but that's just the way it goes. :) They are pulling data based on categories and infoboxes now. Judson [[:en:User:Cohesion]]

David Goodman wrote: I think that I raised both the better search engine, and an organized category scheme back before categories were implemented. Neither happened, and the results have been predictable. I don't think that such a thing as a perfect classification scheme exists, but we _can_ do better than we have now. Ec

K P wrote: 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. 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" 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

On 4/30/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: To solve a problem you need to find the cause first. #1 If anything is wrong with categories is that it's nearly impossible to trace when something is added or removed from a cat. #2 Anyone can make one, even the clueless.