As more people have noticed on this list since this incident, the problem is not with sexism, but with the way categories are managed on Wikipedia. For example the German painter Caspar David Friedrich, who many would argue is in a category all his own, is in both categories "German romantic painters" and "German landscape painters", but is no longer in the category "German painters". You really need a tool like AWB or Catscan to find him (tip: from any English Wikipedia page, type in WP:AWB or WP:catscan). It would be nice if we could specify "flat" when accessing a category, so we could get the whole list, no matter how many thousands of people are in there.
2013/4/30, Daniel and Elizabeth Case dancase@frontiernet.net:
Compare it to the weaknesses of the current category system. 98% of editors don't know what they are doing. >Categories and subcategories are applied inconsistently all the time. Nobody has an overview of the entire tree
structure, or even a major branch of it.
And would this be any less truer of tags?
Something that is a subcategory of American novelists today may stop being one tomorrow, just by dint of a single >edit, and no one would be the wiser (unless they keep hundreds of categories on their watchlist). The category >tree (or weave, as categories can have several parents) changes daily, with categories created, renamed, >recategorised, and deleted. There are incessant arguments about how to name, categorise and diffuse categories, >and about perceived iniquities.[citation needed]
In all the years I’ve been on Wikipedia I think I’ve only once been involved in any dispute over a category’s existence where I didn’t agree (and still don’t) with the outcome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2007_Au... (I suppose it’s only coincidental here that the category in question was mostly populated by articles about women). Indeed, I find it interesting that WP:LEW includes only one example from the category namespace, with everything else very well represented.
Using a defined set of basic tags in combination with something like CatScan – ported across to the Foundation >server if you like, and given a friendly front-end with shortcuts to the most common searches – would do away >with that.
Without really solving the underlying problem, IMO, and making it harder to fix when it recurs.