charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
The problem is that risks going the Citizendium
rout and getting major
fallings out over which cat things should be in rather than say both.
Yes, I think the WP model has scored here, by allowing a bit of soft pedal when it comes
to aspects of the categories that are not quite right. I actually made a public comment
about the category system and failure-in-principle (you know, Leibniz, [[universal
characteristic]], all that) at the first ever meet-up, in London. Fortunately Jimbo moved
swiftly on.
Keep in mind, though, that the primary conflict over categorization at
Citizendium is that categorization entails editorial authority...
being in one category instead of another means an article is the
official territory of one discipline rather than another.
On Wikipedia, that's not a category issue (and wouldn't be even if the
categorization scheme was more rigid.) I frequently see an analogous
situation on Wikipedia when an editor complains about what WikiProject
has "claimed" an article and whether that is appropriate.
Fortunately, it's a nonissue, since it's the editors of a particular
article, rather than a bureaucratic entity, that makes decision about
the article; WikiProjects are just convenient collections of editors
with similar interests.
-Sage