At 02:52 PM 6/6/2004 +0300, Viajero wrote:
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.
Including categories in the search engine would be nice, assuming the search engine was enabled. :) For now, I've been mostly just going to articles which IMO are likely to have similar categories to the ones I'm looking for and hoping that they've been categorized already. Or going to one of the "root" categories and trying to follow the hierarchy down to the specific ones I'm interested in.
- 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)?
Broad categories exist as well. These small, highly-specific categories fit under them as subcategories, which allows them to be grouped in very flexible ways. For example, the "Boston Bruins players" category could fall under the "Boston Bruins" category, which could fall under the "American football teams" category, which could fall under the "American football" category, so that if one wanted to grab a list of "all American football-related articles" one could recursively include the subcategories of "American football" and all those players' articles would be there. But "Boston Bruins" could also fall under the category "Boston", so those players would show up if one grabbed a list of "all Boston-related articles". They can also fall under the category "Team sports players", which could fall under the category "Sports players", which could fall under the category "Athletes". So a list of all athletes on Wikipedia would include the Boston Bruins players as well. (note: Wikipedia seems to be down right now, so I'm just making these details up hypothetically)
The alternative would be to give each of the Boston Bruins players the categories "American football", "Boston", and "Athletes", which would get extremely messy and require much fancier queries if, say, you wanted a list of articles about American football teams without including articles about the particular players.