K P wrote:
You need a librarian for this. We're trying to do everything for free and voluntary at Wikipedia, but categorizing things requires an overarching scheme and Wikipedia is implemented and run to prevent just this.
True enough. I sometimes think that some of our categorizers get so caught up in the process that they forget why we categorize in the first place. When categories are either too broad or too narrow their usefulness becomes limited.
I had a number of group programming assingments in school (long ago), and one woman in the class was a reject for all groups, as she was a lousy programmer. I let her be in our group, figuring she couldn't harm my programs. Turns out she was a librarian, and when it came to writing databases we kicked everyone else's butts. It always seemed so easy after she organized everything, but there is no way I have the skills to do what she did, because she understood how categories work--and she knew that you had to start at the top (all the programmers here are thinking, of couse, that in those days that was what programmers were supposed to do, too), and she knew where to place the top.
An enlightening parable! Perhaps today's programmers attach too much importance to their own code bits. As with many ventures it requires taking a step back so that one can see the big picture.
Nobody on Wikipedia or Wikimedia even knows what categories are, much less how they work, as far as I can tell. Set theory? Probably no one understands that either.
"Nobody" is a somewhat harsh judgement. Those that do see the problem just give up fighting with those obsessed with their own little corner of categories. The set theory analogy is interesting. One needs to make the distinction between a set of elements, and a set of subsets which each have one element.
Ec