Thanks to various responses to my earlier post on the subject, I have come to appreciate
some of the possibilities of Categories, at least in theory. So, this morning I decided to
categorize the forty or so articles on writers which I created or to which I made major
contributions, having seen several suitable Categories show up in my Watchlist for similar
articles. To start with, I wanted to know what categories have already been created for
writers and journalists. For example, I saw a category for for "Argentine
writers" (the article on Borges I think). Does this mean I should also create a
category for Uruguayan, Mexican, and Chilean writers (I wrote up a couple) even though
such categories would have one or two entries? However, there doesn't seem to be any
comprehensive, hierarchical index of categories. [[Wikipedia:Categorization]] should serve
this function, but it is woefully incomplete. [[Category:Main page]] is even worse. So, I
turned to
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Categories&article=L…
which is an alphabetical list of categories, but the first five hundred only range from
".hack" to "British cheeses", suggesting that already on the order of
eight to ten thousand categories (!!!) have been created. Obviously this page huge
can't be used for looking up existing categories, if only because it would place a
tremendous burden on the servers. A random selection from just the first 500:
* 1983 albums
* 24-hour television news channels
* AHL Trophies and Awards
* Aerosmith albums
* Airports of the United Arab Emirates
* Art galleries and museums in Ohio
* Belgian cuisine
* Boston Bruins players
What can possibly be the use of such narrow categories with only a handful of entries?
Shouldn't we be aiming for broad categories (ie, albums, tv stations, awards,
airports, museums, cuisines, atheletes)?
In any case, my only option for writers appears to be to add categories on an ad hoc
basis, and that exactly is what seems to be happening across the entire encyclopedia.
Turning to opera, for example, a topic which I have worked a lot on, I see on
[[Category:Opera_singers]] that the following categories have been created:
Category:Baritone opera singers,
Category:Bass opera singers,
Category:Contraltos (opera singers),
Category:Mezzo-sopranos (opera singers),
Category:Sopranos (opera singers),
Category:Tenors (opera singers)
They aren't even consistently labelled! It is entirely possible, perhaps probable that
someone will come along and create "Category:Contraltos opera singers"
"Category:Tenors". Each has only one entry (tenor has two), indicating that they
were created on a strictly ad hoc basis with no effort made to track down all the articles
for a given category.
I realize Categories are very new and the system will evolve. I am also a big fan of
Wikipedia's self-organizing characteristics and I don't want to sound like a
control freak. However, it seems to me that Categories will only be useful if the system
is implemented in a thoughtful way. At the very least, it should be compulsory to add new
categories to [[Wikipedia:Categorization]] or [[Category:Main page]], so that they can be
referenced and evaluated by other editors. Better yet would be to have some kind of
vetting procedure for introducing new categories. But given the number of categories now
in use, it seems that the genie is out of the bottle and that this is all just wishful
thinking.
V.