On 4/9/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/9/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
Folks,
I'm angry right now, so I very probably should not post to the List
until I
cool off; but my emotions are overriding my good senses at the moment -
so
here goes.
It concerns what has been a pet peeve of mine almost from the beginning
of
my work with the encyclopedia: CATEGORIES!
I do a fair amount of research in my work, and one of the things that attracted me to WP in the first place was the Category feature. If I
were
doing research on, say, Accidental Deaths, or Suicides, or Cancer Deaths
(to
name just three) I could select on these Categories and, bingo, I would
have
an entire wealth of documented cases of persons with these
characteristics.
NOW, the Category Police have so diluted this process with trillions of subcategories, e.g., Persons who died accidentally on a train while traveling from Newark to Tampa ;-) - that the whole Category system has become worthless to serious researchers. This, in itself, would not be a problem, but to add the greatest injury of all, each person included in
this
subcategory has been removed from the main one. So to see all cases of Accidental deaths in the encyclopedia I have to go to each subcategory, print the lists and collate them myself. Agghh!
I have sworn off Categories. I have taken the pledge. From now on I
won't
even look at the bottom of an Article.
There, I feel better now :-) Thanks for your ear.
Marc, I couldn't agree more but I've given up arguing about it. Apparently, the same person is not allowed to appear in the main category if they're also in a subcategory. So people's names are removed from "Accidental deaths" and placed instead in the subcat "deaths while falling from a ladder at lunchtime in Solihull." It has been explained a thousand times that these micro categories, plus the no-repeated-names rule, wipe out the point of having categories in the first place, but there is a small but determined group in charge of categories, and there's no reasoning with them.
Sarah
I agree with Marc and Sarah. I have had problems with people insisting that country-level categories MUST remain empty of all but the main country article, and people who create two-level deep subcategories, just to insert one single article. And if you try to argue with them, they say that all categories have that format, so that's just the way it has to be.
Ian