On 30/04/07, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Marc Riddell wrote
This is what I am asking for in WP. That is why both the main and sub categories need to be entered into each Article.
I recall you saying all this some time ago, a propos your own view of what would be convenient. I'm not clear this actually convenient for most users of Wikipedia, i.e. to have large chunks of nested categories made explicit.
Can you not just accept that the system doesn't revolve about your needs?
I am going to be blunt and agree here; I don't think "the category system is fundamentally broken" can reasonably come from "because it doesn't work the way I think it ought". My subtle attempts to intimate this don't seem to have worked, and I want to be clear that I think we're all barking up the wrong tree. There are flaws in our category system, but this is not one of them.
This is the basic issue here. Marc thinks categories should work in a way that conforms to his expectations - essentially, an undifferentiated list of all things with attribute X. Currently, categories are differentiated lists - topics split up into smaller sublists with each page hopefully only appearing once in any given topic-group.
If we change the current system, things will be convenient for Marc; it will be more useful as a database. 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.
(Yes, we could have the tight topical categories in Marc's model - but at the cost of swamping pages with references to a huge number of categories which are redundant to one degree or another, and just make navigation that much more tricky for the user)
Somewhere down thread, the mystical expertise of librarians was invoked. I am one, and I belive that tight categorisation is the way to go. I feel that Marc's model, if implemented in the simple quick-fix method of "just include parent and child categories in the same article" will actually make our categorisation less useful for general readers and editors, which in no way justifies the limited benefit of being able to do fancy searches on articles by subject attributes.
We can get search in other ways; improving the methods we use to search, having some pseudo-database functions we can do with categories, would go a long way towards the desired effect. Categorisation is, however, used by our readers, and we shouldn't break it without a very pressing reason.