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(a)frontiernet.net>et>:
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_A…
(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.