[WikiEN-l] Categories (was: Hello)

[ScottL]

The Cunctator wrote:
>> I would like to take the discussion back to my original question: May I
>> include both a main category and a subcategory in the same article? I would
>> like to accomplish this without creating an edit war with another editor who
>> thinks it¹s wrong.
> 
> Don't.

   I disagree.  The answer is "it depends", and what it depends on is 
utility in navigation.  There are a number of cases where people have 
managed to do this and it was the right decision.  But, in every case 
you will have to win a small war over it.

   In general if all of the non-sub-category members of a category can 
be placed in a sub-category then they should, and you should not try and 
do both.

   I think the special case of putting an article in both is when there 
is a compelling reason for navigation purposes.  While not common right 
now because of the way we do it and because few people have put time 
into making the Category system an interface to the site, this could 
become common that someone would use the category tree to "browse".  In 
such a case they should be able to find articles with basic knowledge of 
the subject.  Take for example [[Chess]], did you know it is in the 
[[Chaturanga|Chaturanga game family]] and therefor [[Category:Chaturanga 
game family]].  This category being on the article us useful for people 
already at the article, they learn something new.  But for the person 
who is navigating the category tree this is almost with out value unless 
he happens to know that the chaturanga game family is and that Chess is 
a part of it.  The person using the Category system (our veriosn of an 
index) will get as far as [[Category:Abstract strategy games]] and not 
know where to go.  To solve this problem [[Category: Chess]] is a 
subcategory of both of these even though one is a subcategory of the 
other.  And the article [[Chess]] has all three (though I am inclined to 
say that [[Category:Abstract strategy games]] should be removed form the 
article itself.

   There is another great example I think involving articles n the 
individual members of the Beatles and weather they should be included in 
a category as being members of the Beatles and also as being musicians.

    Somethign I wrote about this when I first became a wikipedian comes 
to ming so I dug it up.  It was in the form of a proposal (I do not 
expect it to be accepted which is why I never formalized it) but I think 
it is worth thinking about on this issue.

This is from: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Categorization&oldid=12687247#Proposed_Guidelines

Proposed Guidelines

I have run into this issue a few times in my very short stay (so far) on 
Wikipedia and did some thinking about the situations where I think an 
article should be in a category as well as a sub-category. I came up 
with two guidelines and wanted to see if other people had similar ideas 
or if I am smoking crack. This seems to be the best place to get 
opinions on this issue so here I go ....

Qualitative vs. Quantitative

If the articles in a category are fundamentally the same type of article 
(i.e. about people or places etc.) and the difference between the 
category and sub-category is fundamentally qualitative then the article 
should only be listed in the sub-category. This is the example from the 
main page: Queen Elizabeth should not be listed directly under People, 
but Queens of England might be a good place for her. To say it a 
different way Queen Elizabeth would not be put in "Queens of England" 
just because she was a better/more famous/more notable person. The other 
side of this is when the difference is primarily quantitative. The 
example than I ran into that is good here, is the category "Chess 
grandmasters" and "Chess players". A person DOES go from being 'just' a 
chess player to being a Chess grandmaster by being a better chess 
player, so the difference is primarily quantitative and the article 
should be listed in both. A good way to tell if you are in this 
situation is: If the sub-category were deleted and all its contents 
imported into the super-category would it significantly reduce the 
usefulness of the super category? This brings me to the second guideline.

[However I now think this should be modified by the notion that if all 
the articles of a specific type, in a category can be put into 
subcategories they should and the super-category should be dropped from 
the articles.  Using the same example is a set of acceptable and 
inclusive sub-categories (grandmasters, International masters, masters, 
... , unrated) could be agreed on so that no people articles remained 
then that should be done and the category [[Chess: chess players]] 
should be restricted to non-people articles. (a good example of this is 
[[Category:Magnet schools]] which has the schools themselves in sub-cats 
and only has a few articles on the topic itself in the category.)]

<SNIP OUT MY NAVIGATIONAL UTILITY SECTION AS ITS THE SAME AS WHAT I 
WROTE AT THE TOP>

Summary: I hope this is the right place for this, and as a clueless 
newbie I hope I am not re-hashing something that has already been 
discussed into the ground and resolved. If so and there has been some 
succinct treatment of the issue somewhere a pointer on my talk page 
would be awesome, even though I put "Proposed guidelines" above I am 
really just asking since I keep running into this and I am a but of a 
meta data freak. Dalf | Talk 02:18, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)


SKL