what about selecting a topic you know well (perhaps
Opera ? or a
larger
Music group), gather around you a bunch of editors you know to be
reliable editors on that topic, then make a working group to identify
which categories should exist, to which extent, under which naming
scheme...
Then, when you all agree together, write down for example all the
categories which are likely to cover the Opera topic, then make a
list
of all articles which should belong on which category, have a bot do
the
categories for these articles, and remove all categories which do
not
fit the scheme.
Viajero wrote:
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.
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org