I'm again intrigued by the discussions here, be it categorizations or a user I seem to have never come across called 172 (?). I came back from a weekend a couple of hours ago and since then have been trying to access Wikipedia -- to no avail.
As far as categories are concerned, I tried to point out some days ago that there should be some policy everyone could agree on, but Timwi suggested we should just go ahead. The result of this approach is being deplored already.
I wonder though if a bot is the right answer.
KF
----- Original Message ----- From: "Matthew Trump" wikipedia@decumanus.com To: anthere9@yahoo.com; "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Sent: Sunday, June 06, 2004 6:54 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: A first encounter with Categories
Yes the bot idea or some variation sounds extremely attractive.
During this shakedown cruise of categories, the main thing I've noticed is that they are changing very rapidly. A category is created, and articles are added to it. Then someone else creates more specific sub-categories and begins shifting articles from the higher level to the lower level category. Or the category name is changed to reflect standards of capitalization or formatting (as might happen the opera singer example)
In any case, this is resulting in many editors going through many articles repeated to change the categorization. My watchlist is filled with long repeated edits in multiple waves.
The root of this is that unlike lists, which can be changed "all at once" by moving a page, categories have to tweaked by hand in every single article in a particular category. It is the flip side of the auto-generated nature of categories.
I agree with Anthere that some kind of bot system or automated update of categories would be a very good thing if could alleviate this problem. The current system is not only time-consuming but will inevitably generate anger among editors as they see their hard work of editing many articles swept away. Unlike page moves, this cannot be undone by a simple procedure but requires many edits and hours of work to undo under the current system.