Well, the real question is -- what's the point of categories? It is for useful taxonomy. It is neither to be sympathetic nor to be editorializing. Would it be "useful" to have "Creationism" filed under "Science"? I don't think so. For a library with a fixed and rigid category system (none of these fancy computer nested categories so easy to change), it makes sense that they wouldn't sub-categorize too far down. We're not fixed by such a technical limitation though, and I don't think it is much of a stretch to say "is in the canon" and "it is not in the canon" is a useful organizing principle -- not just in terms of finding other information, but in terms of quickly evaluating the probable reliability of said information.
One of the first articles I created here is the somewhat unexciting [[Figurative system of human knowledge]], the tree of Diderot and d'Alembert, a wonderful artifact in the history of taxonomy (from the famed Encyclopedie). One of the things which was considered most heretical about the Encyclopedie was its taxonomic system -- aside from snide little anti-clerical cross-references ("See: eucharist" under "Cannibalism"), it also daringly classified theology as only a sub-category of philosophy (rather than a super-category of it), and placed "knowledge of god" precariously close to "black magic"!
FF
On 7/7/05, Haukur Þorgeirsson haukurth@hi.is wrote:
Mark wrote:
"[A] book expounding a physics theory will be shelved under physics, and whether it's a good book by a Nobel Prize winner or a crappy book by a kook isn't the cataloging system's job to judge."
Jack added:
"And thats the way it should be done, by intended subject, not by editorialising wikipedians."
I don't see how this example is relevant for Wikipedia. Should any theory or discipline be put into the category "intended" by its proponents? And should those proponents get to decide what categories it *isn't* put into? So we must put Creationism into the Science category and we can't put it into the Pseudoscience category? I don't think that's really the NPOV. (It sounds more like the Sympathetic Point of View which the (no doubt fine) people on Wikinfo state as their goal.)
Regards, Haukur
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