On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I was checking out [[Template:Lifetime]], which seems to be in a state of flux, and was surprised to read
"Since Categories are preferred to be listed in most-common order, the Lifetime template should generally be placed after the last Category tag ..."
Huh? I've always seen Template:Lifetime placed with DEFAULTSORT before the categories. What reason is there to change that? Certainly not the order of categories (which no-one ever seems to be able to decide on). Have there been other changes as well?
WP:CAT has:
"The order in which categories are placed on a page is not governed by any single rule (for example, it does not need to be alphabetical). Normally the most essential, significant categories are listed first."
Which makes more sense to me, as representing the traditional view.
Agreed.
Calling birth and death dates somehow less essential than other categories rather jars with my feelings.
Well, not essential, but it makes sense to me to group categories, especially on pages where there are 30-50 categories. Hidden categories are an example of categories being grouped separately from other categories. "Living people" is arguable a tracker category, rather than a normal category. And things like "birth year" and "death year" are arguably "metadata" categories, or "date categories" - as opposed to (say) "location" categories or "award" categories or "career" (positions held and so on) categories.
Of course, this is all for people. And gets duplicated in template footers and infoboxes.
For other articles, you have similar date categories ("establishment year") and location categories and "type" categories. There *are* broad logical groupings of categories, but how to incorporate that into layout and the category structure has never really taken hold or been possible.
The closest I saw was the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Category_types
But that didn't seem to gain any ground. Maybe someone might want to take another look?
Carcharoth