[WikiEN-l] Category destruction

[Phil Sandifer]

On Apr 29, 2007, at 4:35 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:

> And here we come to the fundamental problem. It's all very well to say
> we need to redevelop the category system, to say that the system is
> broken and failing and so on, but in order to do this we need to
> *decide what categories are*.
>
> We have yet to manage this. Everyone brings their own conceptions to
> the table; we regularly get complaints about the stupidity and
> wastefulness of the system, which are fundamentally just "my preferred
> concept of what this system is is not being used".
>
> We need to sort this out before we go any further - and the problem is
> that both sides are entirely convinced that theirs is the self-evident
> only way to work.

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