On 3/24/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 24/03/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
In the fullness of time, Wikipedia or some fork of it will be properly semantic, with a nice query interface that will let you ask questions like "what are all the birds native to the Chicago area?". In the meantime, people interested in such categorization have little choice but to create these explicit categories and lists, silly and overspecific though they sometimes seem to be. I don't see much harm in this, other than the dreadful waste of time (compared to, say, the time that could be spent implementing a proper semantic scheme once and for all) and the inevitable incompleteness and inaccuracy of the explicit lists.
Indeed. Note how a lot of lists were made more or less superfluous by the category feature. Lists these days need to be of value by order and/or annotation.
- d.
You're behind the times, it's categories that are superfluous, according to the few users in CfD who have decreed it so.
The trend now is to remove categories and replace them with lists. Right now on CfD, without prior consultation of the community of Wikipedia editors who create and edit articles on biota (at least not through their various community portals) an editor who is against categories by geography has got together 2 like-minded editors and is ramming through deletion of biota by geography categories in a trial run to do away with all of them and replace them with lists.
I assumed that such a change in overall Wikipedia policy by a few editors would have been well-thought out and understood and would have been relevant to the area in which it was being implemented (biota and/or geography), and asked questions (I have no idea what lists do and categories do, and assumed that categories were created for a reason, but apparently not). The questions were not answered, or answered by editors defending the deletion who had little knowledge of physical geography (relevant to distributions of biota) or biota. For the latter I offer this closing quote: "Indeed, animals do not mind human borders, so anything found in one country is likely also found in the next country over." This essentially means that there likely nothing endemic to any country, which is purely original speculation (not OR, as no research was involved in the statement.) "List of birds native to Chicago area but not the whole of North America"
Endemic to Chicago is the terminology.
KP