Hallo!

Folgende Nachricht habe ich in die englische Liste zur allgemeinen Diskussion geschickt. Möglicherweise wird dort etwas pragmatischer an die Kategorien herangegangen, aber meine Kritik halte ich für wesentlich.

Melvin schrieb:

wahrscheinlich wird es nur so gehen, dass die Kategorien unabhängig von den Inhalten erstellt werden, in einem eigenen Wiki-Projekt zB., beides, eine Enzyklopädie und eine Klassifiaktion zu machen, das ist schon sehr schwierig, in zwei unabhängigen Projekten könnte es aber gehen.

Amen.

== Categories considered harmful ==

Since Version 1.3 of MediaWiki we have the nice category function. In the german wikipedia there is a lot of confusion and struggle on how to use categories in the right way. As a student of library science I could tell several methods how to classify, index and sort things but none of them seems to be applicable easily with the current implementation of categories.

As far as I can tell there are three main reasons for Wikipedia's success:

1. It's very easy to contribute (Wikitax, everybody can edit) 2. Every edit is monitored in watchlists and list of lasts edits so we can control each other 3. There is a clear common mission - to create an encyclopedia (+NPOV)

As far as I also can see the category-function contradicts all of them:

1. It's not easy.

It's not easy to know how to do it in the right way because subject indexing is a complex issue and it's not easy because of lacks in the implementation (no rename, no redirects, no assignment of articles to categories without editing every single the article pages). Editing an article I have to guess which categories are existing, how they are spelled and the rules what to classify into them and what not.

2. It's not controllable.

You cannot watch a category to get noticed on new articles or when somebody removes an article from the category nor when sub-categories are created.

3. There is no common mission

Can anybody tell the purpose of categories? Finding articles (without a coordinated search function?!) Browsing in topics (without a clear overview of all categories?!) Are we trying to index articles with subject heading, using a thesaurus, a classification or even a structure ontology? Library science has invented several kind of schemes like that but at the moment everybody is muddling this and that trying to invent the already invented wheels of documentation (by the way there are also methods of automatic indexing, clustering and classification).

And: In classification there is no NPOV because there is no "right" way to classify the world but it depends on the special needs and questions I want to answer with a special system of subject indexing.

Given the reasons I strongly recommend to stop using the categories and to focus on writing and improving good articles. Many categories can easily be replaced with normal links between articles. Adding and removing categories do not change an article's content a bit. If you want to keep track of all articles in some area use (Wiki)Projects, article series, portals and learn how to use the "what links here"-function! A good article is an article that can be found easily without categories.

Indeed classifying wikipedia articles is very interesting and will become more important, but this should be an independent project - maybe in a "Classifipedia" or "Categorypedia" that links to wikipedia articles.

You know - librarians normally do not write the books they organize and search engine experts do not write the websites they crawl, so let's focus on what we can do the best: creating the most detailed, most understandable and freest encyclopedia in the history of mankind!

Greetings, Jakob Voss (aka nichtich@de.wikipedia)