On 02/05/07, K P <kpbotany(a)gmail.com> wrote:
However, my
experience is that
most of our readers aren't looking for a database - they're looking
for relatively focused, specific, categorisation for navigational
purposes, where a tightly topical category of 20-50 articles is
substantially more useful than a grand supercategory of 2000-5000.
A question I've asked a million things, then how do you categorize things
that come in already created categories that have more than 50 members? For
example, plant families can't be categories, because there are too many with
over 50 members, horticultural varieties of a specific species cannot be
categories because you can't have more than 50ish members, the
"substantially useful" size of a category. Varieties of sage should be
broken up precisely how to conform to the category scheme, and doesn't this
wind up being original research when dealing with organism categories?
No, no, no, no. "20-50" was an arbitrary number I pulled out of the
air - it's just saying that, from a usability perspective, a category
of a few dozen is better than a category of a few thousand. This is
not an attempt to legislate size!
We shouldn't be *artificially* subdividing categories - we will always
have some unwieldy categories, ones which can't fundamentally be
broken down any easier. There is nothing wrong with having the
occasional overly-large category, as long as there is a reason for
that - the reason here being "it would not be helpful to subdivide
further".
Categorise on the most granular scale that is useful and practical. If
you can't usefully divide a category below a thousand members, then
leave it with a thousand members - but most categories can, and
should, be broken down well before you reach that point.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk