On 5/2/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 02/05/07, K P <kpbotany(a)gmail.com> wrote:
However,
my experience is that
most of our readers aren't looking for a database - they're looking
for relatively focused, specific, categorisation for navigational
purposes, where a tightly topical category of 20-50 articles is
substantially more useful than a grand supercategory of 2000-5000.
A question I've asked a million things, then how do you categorize
things
that come in already created categories that have
more than 50 members?
For
example, plant families can't be categories,
because there are too many
with
over 50 members, horticultural varieties of a
specific species cannot be
categories because you can't have more than 50ish members, the
"substantially useful" size of a category. Varieties of sage should be
broken up precisely how to conform to the category scheme, and doesn't
this
wind up being original research when dealing with
organism categories?
No, no, no, no. "20-50" was an arbitrary number I pulled out of the
air - it's just saying that, from a usability perspective, a category
of a few dozen is better than a category of a few thousand. This is
not an attempt to legislate size!
We shouldn't be *artificially* subdividing categories - we will always
have some unwieldy categories, ones which can't fundamentally be
broken down any easier. There is nothing wrong with having the
occasional overly-large category, as long as there is a reason for
that - the reason here being "it would not be helpful to subdivide
further".
Categorise on the most granular scale that is useful and practical. If
you can't usefully divide a category below a thousand members, then
leave it with a thousand members - but most categories can, and
should, be broken down well before you reach that point.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
Unfortunately, you're a librarian and you see and think through the obvious
this way, but try telling that sometimes to the folks at Commons, where, if
it doesn't fit on a single article page, it CANNOT be a category.
Yes, families can be broken down alphabetically, but why should they, if
there is no relationship among members solely because of their place in the
alphabet? There's no need to fear ignorance in categorizing plants, as
botanists write taxonomy in Latin, so even other botanists are ignorant of
what is going on and must repeatedly consult codes.
If you break down a family into genera, then you can wind up with something
from one of the big families, where you have 5 genera with 100 members each
and a couple of thousand genera or categories with only one member each,
again, you haven't done anything useful.
See what happens when you add a professional into the mix to discuss their
area, though, instead of letting amateurs try to group think their way out
of it? It's simple, there wind up being some huge categories according to
the need, but most are more discrete. But that's not what happens on
Wikipedia, or Wikimedia Commns, where I've been waiting 2 weeks now for
someone to explain categories to me, after they spent the past few months
beating me up verbally for not using them their
way-of-the-day-of-a-particular-editor/administrator.
The other issue, though, is, do the Wikipedia users use categories to find
information? IF this is the case, then they might be built differently from
how they would be if they were only internally used by editors. As the
categories are listed on the article page, I suspect this is the intention,
but I get argued down on this, no one should ever categorize something for
the use of the reader, again, especially in Commons, but also in Wikipedia,
categories don't exist for users. Then why display them in article space?
KP