[WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist

[Charles Matthews]

Andrew Gray wrote:
> 2009/8/9 Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>:
>
>   
>> So all the biographies of women could be tagged "woman"? That would
>> work, but only if the "woman" tag wasn't applied to other things as
>> well. Maybe you would have to have "woman" + "biography"? Even then,
>> it might not be exact. And then you would have "adult", "boy", "girl",
>> "child", "male", "female".
>>
>> Tags and categories are different. Ideally, you would have both, or a
>> clear of idea of what would be "primary" tags (what we call
>> categories) and what are descriptive tags.
>>     
>
> This is similar to what de.wp use, I believe:
>
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tuchman
>
> [[Kategorie:Literatur (20. Jahrhundert)]]
> [[Kategorie:Literatur (Englisch)]]
> [[Kategorie:Autor]]
> [[Kategorie:Pulitzer-Preisträger]]
> [[Kategorie:Journalist]]
> [[Kategorie:Person im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg]]
> [[Kategorie:US-Amerikaner]]
> [[Kategorie:Geboren 1912]]
> [[Kategorie:Gestorben 1989]]
> [[Kategorie:Frau]]
>
> Note that in English, we'd consider most of these very high-level
> categories, and indeed:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tuchman
>
> [[Category:1912 births]]
> [[Category:1989 deaths]]
> [[Category:American Jews]]
> [[Category:American military writers]]
> [[Category:Historians of the United States]]
> [[Category:German-American Jews]]
> [[Category:Jewish American historians]]
> [[Category:Morgenthau family|Barbara Tuchman]]
> [[Category:Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction winners]]
> [[Category:Radcliffe College alumni]]
> [[Category:World War I historians]]
>
> Almost all of those are *much* more specific categories - you wouldn't
> get a "Historians of the United States" or "American military writers"
> category in German, and you wouldn't get "Authors" or "Women" in
> English.
>
> Though, that said, it's very interesting to note that they each
> reflect entirely different aspects. In German, being a writer is
> emphasised. In English, the writing is dealt with more by subject
> matter (...military writers / ...historians), and the Jewish
> background is emphasised as much if not more than the nationality. A
> German reader finds out about the Spanish Civil War; an English reader
> finds out about Radcliffe.
>
>   
Having had a conversation with a German Wikipedian who clearly thinks 
our way of doing it is broken, I'm interested in the arguments on the 
other side. In zoology, for example, following the Linnean 
classification in the category system just makes good sense: the experts 
have sorted through the various attributes of (say) a fish species for 
us, and come up with answers that make sense for classifying articles as 
well as species. In my own field of mathematics, good subcategorisation 
will be a great help to those who want to read around a subject, and I'm 
not very struck with [[de:K-Theorie]] as categorised by

[[Kategorie:Algebra]]
[[Kategorie:Topologie]]

when [[en:K-theory]] is categorised as

[[Category:Algebra]]
[[Category:Algebraic topology]]
[[Category:K-theory|*]]

and [[Category:K-theory]] has over 20 specialised articles. Presumably 
one hopes to find those flopping around under the German system in 
algebra and topology categories. But the first example I found where 
there was an interwiki was [[de:Calkin-Algebra]] which lies in

[[Kategorie:Funktionalanalysis]]
[[Kategorie:Mathematischer Raum]].

Believe me on this: it looks like you'd have to search a big chunk of 
mathematical articles just to find those K-theory articles. Not so good. 
(Even if you could get "algebraic topology" by intersecting "algebra" 
and "topology", which is a big stretch because "topological algebra" is 
not at all the same thing. Confusion of method and subject matter.)

More comprehensibly (perhaps) [[Category:Puritanism]] was bugging me, as 
a fairly unverifiable concept in numerous cases. So I created 15 or more 
subcategories in the hope of having verifiable historical information 
the predominant factor in 17th century English religious history. I'd 
like to think I wasn't wasting my time on that.

Charles