I've always been big fan of lists for many reasons and I thought
about this too.
I agree with Ray that one big advantage of lists is that they show
red links.
Another advantage is that lists can be formatted and augmented in
customized ways, ones that would take a large amount of customized
programming to produce. For example, the list of opera composers can
not only include uncreated articles, but it can also be hand-tailored
to include information like dates of birth, nationality--or perhaps
arranged in chronological order, or by nationality, etc. To me this
kind of information architecture is large part of the beauty of
Wikipeidia.
Many list articles are like a human-made SQL query from the database
of Wikipedia that would have required a huge overhead in database
fields to create automatically.
Certainly there may be lists that are rendered obsolete by
categories, but in the majority of cases, I see categories as
complementing lists in most cases, not replacing them.
But this will all shake out. The debate about how lists will work is
really over. Whatever was said is water under the bridge Now it's a
matter of the collectivity of contributions from editors actually
creating categories that will determine how they are really used.
As far as lists being "out of date". Well, that's *always* been an
issue with lists and will remain so. I don't see that as a problem,
really. We all do our best, to keep things synchronized and
up-to-date. Certainly categories will suffer that same thing too,
since many newe articles will be created without appropriate category
tags.
Ray Saintonge said:
Viajero wrote:
Maybe I have been out of the loop but just what is
the purpose of
Categories?
Just now I noticed that someone went through a bunch of pages I was
watching and added the cateogry "Opera Composer" which seems
entirely logical for the relevant articles, except that we have
already have a page [[List of opera composers]]. Does this mean that
this article is redundant? My personal instinct, which may or may
not be relevant here, is not to do things in two different ways when
one suffices. Will people continue to update the handmade lists now
that Categories pages are available in such cases of redundancy as
this? If not, they should be deleted, as outdated lists are a help
to nobody.
Yes and no. To some extent the manual lists are wish lists with
empty
links appearing in red. The category system can't pick up list
elements
that don't exist. Any manual list should probably receive a category
tag as well. In a closed end subject or one that is effectively
closed-ended (such as the list of US presidents) there are strong
arguments from deleting the list when pages exist for all its
elements.
The list of opera composers, however, is open-ended and should
probably
remain so that new names can be added, and we can know which have
been
done and which remain to be done.
Ec
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