[WikiEN-l] Policy on including templates in automatic categories

[Matt Brown]

On 11/10/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've been altering templates, as and when I come across them, so that the
> template itself is **not** included in the category to which it
> automagically adds articles.


I agree. Strongly so. I do believe that if this is done, the template which
adds to the category should be linked to from the category description,
however.

Perhaps it's my software-development background, but I see categories as an
'is-a' relationship, and find it jarring when people do not follow that
relationship with category members. Some seem to use a 'is related to'
relationship instead.

I would argue that the 'is-a' relationship helps categories mean something
that is much more useful.

Especially in this case, excluding the template itself from the category
makes the categorisation more powerful - because the category then contains
ONLY pages with the template in them. This is useful for, e.g., automated
tools to work with. It also exposes less of the 'guts' of Wikipedia's
workings to the reader.

In parallel with this, I'm wondering whether there is a case for having more
> than one "category-like" namespace, so that we can have a separate set of
> "categories" for project-related stuff. For example, the automagic
> [[category:articles which survived deletion]] (or something like that
> anyway) was removed from the {{oldvfd/oldafd/oldvfdfull/oldafdfull}}
> templates, on the grounds that it was self-referential. The thing was that
> it is actually useful information to keep track of, and having one central
> place for it, rather than scanning laboriously "what links here" lists for
> several templates. It would have been nice if we could have had something
> like [[wikipedia-category:articles which survived deletion]] to keep this
> stuff in.
>

I agree strongly with this, too. There are two uses of categories: 'for the
reader' and 'for the editor'. The two should probably be distinct somehow.

The work-around with the current situation is to categorise the article's
talk page in the 'for the editor' case. Not neat, but it works, and it
doesn't break the metaphor that the article is 'for the reader' and the talk
page is 'for the editor'.

-Matt