There are lots of useless categories out there. Peoples disabilities, sexual orientation, their religion, as well as other trivial information is being used to categorize. We have a lot of underpopulated and useless categories out there
I think a spring cleanup is necessary (though we do not need to wait till spring). - Cool Cat
On Thu, 8 Feb 2007 20:39:09 +0200, "Cool Cat" wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
There are lots of useless categories out there. Peoples disabilities, sexual orientation, their religion, as well as other trivial information is being used to categorize. We have a lot of underpopulated and useless categories out there
I quite agree. Pride is a fine thing, but I remain unconvinced that many people want a navigational aid to all the notable people who are or might have been gay / Jewish / Methylated Wesletarian / whatever; much more likely that they will go along thinking "I am gay / Jewish / Methylated Wesletarian / whatever, show me that lots of famous people were as well, to validate that". I'm also convinced that a lot of this categorisation is used to pursue an agenda.
Guy (JzG)
If someone is really gay or is suspected of being gay... If someone is a Christian... If someone is a Methylated Wesletarian... (whatever that is ^_^' )
All that can be mentioned in the relevant article...
- Cool Cat
On 2/8/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Thu, 8 Feb 2007 20:39:09 +0200, "Cool Cat" wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
There are lots of useless categories out there. Peoples disabilities,
sexual
orientation, their religion, as well as other trivial information is
being
used to categorize. We have a lot of underpopulated and useless
categories
out there
I quite agree. Pride is a fine thing, but I remain unconvinced that many people want a navigational aid to all the notable people who are or might have been gay / Jewish / Methylated Wesletarian / whatever; much more likely that they will go along thinking "I am gay / Jewish / Methylated Wesletarian / whatever, show me that lots of famous people were as well, to validate that". I'm also convinced that a lot of this categorisation is used to pursue an agenda.
Guy (JzG)
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
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On Thu, 8 Feb 2007 21:09:37 +0200, "Cool Cat" wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
If someone is really gay or is suspected of being gay... If someone is a Christian... If someone is a Methylated Wesletarian... (whatever that is ^_^' ) All that can be mentioned in the relevant article...
Yup. And it's not necessary to have 123,748 cats for every possible variation thereof.
Oh: Methylated Wesletarian - my dad made that up to describe a rather unsuccessful Origami model of a church :o)
Guy (JzG)
So do you have a suggestion to tackle/quick attack the problem? CfD is a slow and inefficient procedure to get rid of nonsense. Too many panic/contradictory "Keep" votes just pile up in almost an instant.
- Cool Cat
On 2/8/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Thu, 8 Feb 2007 21:09:37 +0200, "Cool Cat" wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
If someone is really gay or is suspected of being gay... If someone is a Christian... If someone is a Methylated Wesletarian... (whatever that is ^_^' ) All that can be mentioned in the relevant article...
Yup. And it's not necessary to have 123,748 cats for every possible variation thereof.
Oh: Methylated Wesletarian - my dad made that up to describe a rather unsuccessful Origami model of a church :o)
Guy (JzG)
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
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On Thu, 8 Feb 2007 21:16:49 +0200, "Cool Cat" wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
So do you have a suggestion to tackle/quick attack the problem? CfD is a slow and inefficient procedure to get rid of nonsense. Too many panic/contradictory "Keep" votes just pile up in almost an instant.
No way forward other than to gain consensus. Without a solid body of the community behind the change you will be accused of robbing people of their Jewish / black / gay / unicyclist identity. Quite how removing a cat from a Wikipedia article robs someone of their identity I don't know, but that is what is asserted. First stop the Village Pump, I guess.
Guy (JzG)
Can you initiate a discussion? People will accuse me random garbage if I do everything. :)
- Cool Cat
On 2/8/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Thu, 8 Feb 2007 21:16:49 +0200, "Cool Cat" wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
So do you have a suggestion to tackle/quick attack the problem? CfD is a slow and inefficient procedure to get rid of nonsense. Too many panic/contradictory "Keep" votes just pile up in almost an instant.
No way forward other than to gain consensus. Without a solid body of the community behind the change you will be accused of robbing people of their Jewish / black / gay / unicyclist identity. Quite how removing a cat from a Wikipedia article robs someone of their identity I don't know, but that is what is asserted. First stop the Village Pump, I guess.
Guy (JzG)
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
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Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Thu, 8 Feb 2007 21:16:49 +0200, "Cool Cat" wrote:
So do you have a suggestion to tackle/quick attack the problem? CfD is a slow and inefficient procedure to get rid of nonsense. Too many panic/contradictory "Keep" votes just pile up in almost an instant.
No way forward other than to gain consensus. Without a solid body of the community behind the change you will be accused of robbing people of their Jewish / black / gay / unicyclist identity. Quite how removing a cat from a Wikipedia article robs someone of their identity I don't know, but that is what is asserted. First stop the Village Pump, I guess.
While it's easy to agree that there are a lot of useless and lame categories, it's also the case that campaigns to purge these categories do more to create friction than to solve problems. With patience those with an identity crisis will eventually go away at which time the pointless categories can be removed without much fuss.
BTW, Methylated Wesletarian (who are dead) need to be distinguished from Ethylated Wesletarians, who are merely drunk. This must be divided into two categories. :-)
Ec
On 2/8/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
While it's easy to agree that there are a lot of useless and lame categories, it's also the case that campaigns to purge these categories do more to create friction than to solve problems. With patience those with an identity crisis will eventually go away at which time the pointless categories can be removed without much fuss.
BTW, Methylated Wesletarian (who are dead) need to be distinguished from Ethylated Wesletarians, who are merely drunk. This must be divided into two categories. :-)
That's being unnecessarily categoristic - youre chauvinistic categorism is no doubt motivated by a nefarious desire to destroy the fragile compact that holds the various tangential and differentiated branches of the Methylated Wesletarian community together under a single monicker.
-SV , (human)
Based on this discussion I wrote an Essay, feel free to comment/expand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Do_not_write_articles_using_categorie...
-Cool Cat
On 2/9/07, stvrtg stvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/8/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
While it's easy to agree that there are a lot of useless and lame categories, it's also the case that campaigns to purge these categories do more to create friction than to solve problems. With patience those with an identity crisis will eventually go away at which time the pointless categories can be removed without much fuss.
BTW, Methylated Wesletarian (who are dead) need to be distinguished from Ethylated Wesletarians, who are merely drunk. This must be divided into two categories. :-)
That's being unnecessarily categoristic - youre chauvinistic categorism is no doubt motivated by a nefarious desire to destroy the fragile compact that holds the various tangential and differentiated branches of the Methylated Wesletarian community together under a single monicker.
-SV , (human) _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Cool Cat wrote:
Based on this discussion I wrote an Essay, feel free to comment/expand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Do_not_write_articles_using_categorie...
The general principle of avoiding excessive categories is sound. The art is in getting cleaning up the excesses without upsetting a lot of people, and causing a lot of flame wars. Patience can be your friend.
Ec
On 2/11/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Cool Cat wrote:
Based on this discussion I wrote an Essay, feel free to comment/expand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Do_not_write_articles_using_categorie...
The general principle of avoiding excessive categories is sound. The art is in getting cleaning up the excesses without upsetting a lot of people, and causing a lot of flame wars. Patience can be your friend.
Ec
But what is excessive? Since you have very little idea exactly what groupings people will be looking for I would tend to argue that it is worth risking a little over categorisation.
Geni people can make good use of search tools. Categories should be used to group people who significantly relate to each other such as by nationality/occupation and not trivial material like hobbies/likes/dislikes.
The problem is we do not have a 'little' overcategorization but instead we have a lot. CfD process is overwhelmed with the constant mass cfds.
We do not get a lot of excess stub templates/categories. One is not allowed to create a stub template w/o a discussion in principle. Same principle should be applied to categories. If something doesn't ever get acceptance, fewer people would be upset.
Perhaps a wikiproject regulating categories might not be a bad idea.
- Cool Cat
On 2/11/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/11/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Cool Cat wrote:
Based on this discussion I wrote an Essay, feel free to comment/expand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Do_not_write_articles_using_categorie...
The general principle of avoiding excessive categories is sound. The art is in getting cleaning up the excesses without upsetting a lot of people, and causing a lot of flame wars. Patience can be your friend.
Ec
But what is excessive? Since you have very little idea exactly what groupings people will be looking for I would tend to argue that it is worth risking a little over categorisation.
-- geni
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on 2/12/07 6:19 AM, Cool Cat at wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps a wikiproject regulating categories might not be a bad idea.
Sounds like a great idea. I'd be one of the first in line to sign on.
Marc Riddell
On 2/12/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 2/12/07 6:19 AM, Cool Cat at wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps a wikiproject regulating categories might not be a bad idea.
Sounds like a great idea. I'd be one of the first in line to sign on.
Marc Riddell
When trying to sort out our images and their copyright status I would rather not have to submit every category I find myself needed to a bunch of self appointed busy bodies who are unlikely to know much more about copyright than the average wikipedian.
The stubs wikiproject works because the vast majority of people who are interested in new stubs and stub sorting are part of the project. That would not be the case with a categories wikiproject.
geni wrote:
On 2/12/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 2/12/07 6:19 AM, Cool Cat at wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps a wikiproject regulating categories might not be a bad idea.
Sounds like a great idea. I'd be one of the first in line to sign on.
Marc Riddell
When trying to sort out our images and their copyright status I would rather not have to submit every category I find myself needed to a bunch of self appointed busy bodies who are unlikely to know much more about copyright than the average wikipedian.
The stubs wikiproject works because the vast majority of people who are interested in new stubs and stub sorting are part of the project. That would not be the case with a categories wikiproject.
Do you know, Geni, that sometimes you project a fairly abrasive attitude?
-Rich
Rich Holton wrote:
geni wrote:
On 2/12/07, Marc Riddell wrote:
on 2/12/07 6:19 AM, Cool Cat wrote:
Perhaps a wikiproject regulating categories might not be a bad idea.
Sounds like a great idea. I'd be one of the first in line to sign on.
When trying to sort out our images and their copyright status I would rather not have to submit every category I find myself needed to a bunch of self appointed busy bodies who are unlikely to know much more about copyright than the average wikipedian.
The stubs wikiproject works because the vast majority of people who are interested in new stubs and stub sorting are part of the project. That would not be the case with a categories wikiproject.
Do you know, Geni, that sometimes you project a fairly abrasive attitude?
He does, but less so than when he first appeared. Maybe being on this mailing list has had a therapeutic effect. ;-)
Ec
You know... The actual problem does not involve administrative categories at all. Obviously those would be an exception. Stub wikiproject would take care of stub categories as well. Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy after all.
I believe stub wikiproject is a great success and not a bunch of busy bodies. If a similar categorization wikiproject started off, end results would be only positive. The scope of the wikiproject should only include non-administrative categories intended for items on the article namespace. Geni how does that sound?
- Cool Cat
On 2/12/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/12/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 2/12/07 6:19 AM, Cool Cat at wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps a wikiproject regulating categories might not be a bad idea.
Sounds like a great idea. I'd be one of the first in line to sign on.
Marc Riddell
When trying to sort out our images and their copyright status I would rather not have to submit every category I find myself needed to a bunch of self appointed busy bodies who are unlikely to know much more about copyright than the average wikipedian.
The stubs wikiproject works because the vast majority of people who are interested in new stubs and stub sorting are part of the project. That would not be the case with a categories wikiproject.
-- geni
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On 2/12/07, Cool Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
I believe stub wikiproject is a great success and not a bunch of busy bodies. If a similar categorization wikiproject started off, end results would be only positive. The scope of the wikiproject should only include non-administrative categories intended for items on the article namespace. Geni how does that sound?
You said CFD is having a hard time coping. Given that only a small percentage of cats turn up at CFD I doubt there is any mechanism for coping with what would be a far higher workload.
An alternative approach might be to dig out that old idea of giving wikiprojects more power and giving them the power of cat deletion in their respective areas.
On 12/02/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
An alternative approach might be to dig out that old idea of giving wikiprojects more power and giving them the power of cat deletion in their respective areas.
I would think in the *normal* case they'd have considerable *influence* at CFD. That is: "I'm from WikiProject Foo. We discussed at [[discussion page]] killing these cats, for x reason, to be replaced with these cats." Are there notable cases where the collective wisdom of CFD has said "keep" in a manner that doesn't seem to make sense?
- d.
Yes. Terrorists by nationality categories has been kept for quite sometime for example. - Cool Cat
On 2/12/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/02/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
An alternative approach might be to dig out that old idea of giving wikiprojects more power and giving them the power of cat deletion in their respective areas.
I would think in the *normal* case they'd have considerable *influence* at CFD. That is: "I'm from WikiProject Foo. We discussed at [[discussion page]] killing these cats, for x reason, to be replaced with these cats." Are there notable cases where the collective wisdom of CFD has said "keep" in a manner that doesn't seem to make sense?
- d.
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on 2/12/07 10:29 AM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
An alternative approach might be to dig out that old idea of giving wikiprojects more power and giving them the power of cat deletion in their respective areas.
Whatever it takes. At any rate, I think the entire Categorization System in WP needs reevaluated. It appears to have turned into whatever any individual thinks it should be.
To be most effective, this undertaking would require a formal proposal with agreed upon goals, and a specific group of persons to take it on.
Marc
On 2/12/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 2/12/07 10:29 AM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
An alternative approach might be to dig out that old idea of giving wikiprojects more power and giving them the power of cat deletion in their respective areas.
Whatever it takes. At any rate, I think the entire Categorization System in WP needs reevaluated. It appears to have turned into whatever any individual thinks it should be.
To be most effective, this undertaking would require a formal proposal with agreed upon goals, and a specific group of persons to take it on.
Marc
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. See:
http://www.kalital.com/archives/2006/11/racism_and_sexism_at_citizendi.html
For the problem they ran into. Our current system appears to be fairly good at avoiding that trap at least.
on 2/12/07 11:02 AM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Our current system appears to be fairly good at avoiding that trap at least.
I definitely agree there. You would have to go a far way to find someone less bureaucratic-thinking than me. What I am suggesting is that, like any system that's been around for a while, we take an objective step back to see how it has evolved over time. Is it still accomplishing the goals that were originally set? Has the system kept pace with the growth of the project? Things like that.
Marc
We have a junk-load of categories which only increase in number. Not doing anything is obviously not working. Existing system is incapable of handling it.
A Wikiproject to deal with it is the best idea I have in mind, Geni do you have a better suggestion?
- Cool Cat
On 2/12/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 2/12/07 11:02 AM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Our current system appears to be fairly good at avoiding that trap at least.
I definitely agree there. You would have to go a far way to find someone less bureaucratic-thinking than me. What I am suggesting is that, like any system that's been around for a while, we take an objective step back to see how it has evolved over time. Is it still accomplishing the goals that were originally set? Has the system kept pace with the growth of the project? Things like that.
Marc
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Cool Cat wrote:
We have a junk-load of categories which only increase in number. Not doing anything is obviously not working. Existing system is incapable of handling it.
Frankly, I don't see what's "not working" about the current approach. There are a heck of a lot of categories, some of them highly specific, but it remains to be proven to me how this is actually a _problem_.
It may be that we have different opinions on what the category system should be used for. But real-world usage has developed to the state it is today through a large-scale broad-based process of mass editing, and I suspect an attempt to forcibly wrench it into a different mold is likely to run into a lot of trouble as a result.
We do have different opinions on what the category system should be used for and thats the root of the problem. Wikipedia is based on consensus and there is no process for consensus aside from cfd. Unlike articles, the creation of categories should be based on a consensus not someones belief system.
Today, any random newbie can invent his/her categorization scheme. We are categorizing people by their appetite by nationality today ([[Category:Vegetarians by nationality]]). Someone not being tagged by a category as a vegetarian does not make them a carnivore. Or how about [[Category:Terrorists by nationality]]? I could list more problematic examples.
- Cool Cat
On 2/13/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Cool Cat wrote:
We have a junk-load of categories which only increase in number. Not
doing
anything is obviously not working. Existing system is incapable of
handling
it.
Frankly, I don't see what's "not working" about the current approach. There are a heck of a lot of categories, some of them highly specific, but it remains to be proven to me how this is actually a _problem_.
It may be that we have different opinions on what the category system should be used for. But real-world usage has developed to the state it is today through a large-scale broad-based process of mass editing, and I suspect an attempt to forcibly wrench it into a different mold is likely to run into a lot of trouble as a result.
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Cool Cat wrote:
We do have different opinions on what the category system should be used for and thats the root of the problem. Wikipedia is based on consensus and there is no process for consensus aside from cfd. Unlike articles, the creation of categories should be based on a consensus not someones belief system.
I don't understand. The content of articles and the content of categories are both established "by consensus" in the sense that anyone can edit them, argue about their contents on various talk pages, etc.
The existence or nonexistence of articles is decided by their respective fD processes - AfD for the articles, CfD for the categories. I'm not seeing a fundamental difference here, and I don't see how articles should be based on someone's belief system (I'm not even sure what that means). The biggest difference I can think of is purely technical - categories can't be renamed or redirected, so it requires a lot of bot busywork to shuffle things around. I can't think of a way to fix this by non-technical means, though I have occasionally moved the contents of small categories around "manually" without bothering CfD about it.
Today, any random newbie can invent his/her categorization scheme. We are categorizing people by their appetite by nationality today ([[Category:Vegetarians by nationality]]). Someone not being tagged by a category as a vegetarian does not make them a carnivore.
How does it imply that? There are other options than just "vegetarian" and "carnivore", I'm an omnivore myself. And what does nationality have to do with it? Wouldn't the same issue exist with just plain [[Category:Vegetarians]]?
Or how about [[Category:Terrorists by nationality]]? I could list more problematic examples.
I see nothing problematic about [[category:Terrorists by nationality]] that isn't already inherent in having a separate [[Category:Terrorists]] and [[Category:People by nationality]]. Once one has determined (by whatever means) that someone is both a "terrorist" and an "Elbonian", what problems arise from putting them into "[[Category:Elbonian terrorists]]"?
Indeed. Categorization is at a state of anarchy despite guidelines.
- Cool Cat
On 2/12/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 2/12/07 10:29 AM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
An alternative approach might be to dig out that old idea of giving wikiprojects more power and giving them the power of cat deletion in their respective areas.
Whatever it takes. At any rate, I think the entire Categorization System in WP needs reevaluated. It appears to have turned into whatever any individual thinks it should be.
To be most effective, this undertaking would require a formal proposal with agreed upon goals, and a specific group of persons to take it on.
Marc
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Wikiprojects often do not know the categorization syntax we use, and some of them are rather biased. We should let a group of unbiased people to take care of categories. The point of categories is to be effective navigation aids, nothing else. - Cool Cat
On 2/12/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/12/07, Cool Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
I believe stub wikiproject is a great success and not a bunch of busy bodies. If a similar categorization wikiproject started off, end results would be only positive. The scope of the wikiproject should only include non-administrative categories intended for items on the article
namespace.
Geni how does that sound?
You said CFD is having a hard time coping. Given that only a small percentage of cats turn up at CFD I doubt there is any mechanism for coping with what would be a far higher workload.
An alternative approach might be to dig out that old idea of giving wikiprojects more power and giving them the power of cat deletion in their respective areas.
-- geni
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On 2/12/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
An alternative approach might be to dig out that old idea of giving wikiprojects more power and giving them the power of cat deletion in their respective areas.
Yes, please!
(I recall a time -- when I first started editing -- when a WikiProject could go and clean up a bunch of redundant or misnamed categories by a combination of by-hand changes and speedy tags on the empty categories. Now, unfortunately, this type of thing tends to get stamped out rather quickly, since "all category changes must go through CFD".)
Kirill
On 2/11/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The general principle of avoiding excessive categories is sound. The art is in getting cleaning up the excesses without upsetting a lot of people, and causing a lot of flame wars. Patience can be your friend.
Please demonstrate some harm caused by having "excessive" categories on an article. Assume that all the categories are correctly used: the article belongs to the category, and none of the categories are mutually redundant.
Steve
On 2/13/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Please demonstrate some harm caused by having "excessive" categories on an article. Assume that all the categories are correctly used: the article belongs to the category, and none of the categories are mutually redundant.
Steve
View [[George H. W. Bush]] in the classic skin but that is rather an exceptional example.
geni wrote:
On 2/13/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Please demonstrate some harm caused by having "excessive" categories on an article. Assume that all the categories are correctly used: the article belongs to the category, and none of the categories are mutually redundant.
Steve
View [[George H. W. Bush]] in the classic skin but that is rather an exceptional example.
By this standard there are also far too many interwiki links for this article. We should get rid of some. :)
On a serious note, though, I happen to use the Classic skin as my default and I don't have any problem with this at all. If this sort of thing _was_ sufficiently annoying to me I could put "#catlinks {display:none}" in my custom CSS like what I did to get rid of the stub templates, or just switch to one of the other skins that puts the catlinks at the bottom. Wikipedia's display format is highly configurable so I don't consider this to be a paprticularly strong example of "harm".
On 2/14/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
On a serious note, though, I happen to use the Classic skin as my default and I don't have any problem with this at all. If this sort of thing _was_ sufficiently annoying to me I could put "#catlinks {display:none}" in my custom CSS like what I did to get rid of the stub templates, or just switch to one of the other skins that puts the catlinks at the bottom. Wikipedia's display format is highly configurable so I don't consider this to be a paprticularly strong example of "harm".
Yeah, there are certainly GUI issues, but the semantic markup is itself useful.
Perhaps we could make use of another way of tagging articles: with templates. Or use some ingenuity to solve the problem by other means.
Steve
On 14/02/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
On a serious note, though, I happen to use the Classic skin as my default and I don't have any problem with this at all. If this sort of thing _was_ sufficiently annoying to me I could put "#catlinks {display:none}" in my custom CSS like what I did to get rid of the stub templates, or just switch to one of the other skins that puts the catlinks at the bottom. Wikipedia's display format is highly configurable so I don't consider this to be a paprticularly strong example of "harm".
It would be useful if there were preference switches for what one wanted to see, i.e. "Don't show: [ ] article categories [ ] stub messages ...", and so on, a la the kind of display configuration you get on Slashdot and similar sites, that would set user CSS appropriately. While technical users such as ourselves may be comfortable with editing CSS files, many other users are not.
Earle Martin wrote:
It would be useful if there were preference switches for what one wanted to see, i.e. "Don't show: [ ] article categories [ ] stub messages ...", and so on, a la the kind of display configuration you get on Slashdot and similar sites, that would set user CSS appropriately. While technical users such as ourselves may be comfortable with editing CSS files, many other users are not.
This sort of customizability could go a long way towards resolving some of the deep philosophical differences some groups of users have over formatting issues by giving each group their preferred view of the underlying data. Perhaps some day we'll be able to use a version flagging system to flag articles as "webcomic" or "school" and allow people to completely ignore whole classes of articles whose existence offend them. :)
I guess I am taking things for granted too fast... Any recent US president has way too many categories. They are merely the example symptoms of the problem.
Getting rid of some of these excess categories is something hard to do. Of course this isn't a battle, but people are often emotionally motivated on a number of topics and they sometimes create categories for that end. Especially if a person does not understands the spirit of NPOV, we end up having categories with not very objective titles and a subjective inclusion criteria.
An average cfd discussions get very little attention unless it is on a controversial issue. In your average cfd on a potentially controversial issue, people tend to vote based on their belief system and not based on stuff like usefulness/objectivity/subjectivity of the inclusion criteria of the category in question. For example, although a word to avoid, [[Category:Terrorists by nationality]] has been around for quite sometime.
- Cool Cat
On 2/13/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/11/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The general principle of avoiding excessive categories is sound. The art is in getting cleaning up the excesses without upsetting a lot of people, and causing a lot of flame wars. Patience can be your friend.
Please demonstrate some harm caused by having "excessive" categories on an article. Assume that all the categories are correctly used: the article belongs to the category, and none of the categories are mutually redundant.
Steve
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I'd like to add that this is a developing problem. - Cool Cat
On 2/13/07, Cool Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
I guess I am taking things for granted too fast... Any recent US president has way too many categories. They are merely the example symptoms of the problem.
Getting rid of some of these excess categories is something hard to do. Of course this isn't a battle, but people are often emotionally motivated on a number of topics and they sometimes create categories for that end. Especially if a person does not understands the spirit of NPOV, we end up having categories with not very objective titles and a subjective inclusion criteria.
An average cfd discussions get very little attention unless it is on a controversial issue. In your average cfd on a potentially controversial issue, people tend to vote based on their belief system and not based on stuff like usefulness/objectivity/subjectivity of the inclusion criteriaof the category in question. For example, although a word to avoid, [[Category:Terrorists by nationality]] has been around for quite sometime.
- Cool Cat
On 2/13/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/11/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The general principle of avoiding excessive categories is sound. The art is in getting cleaning up the excesses without upsetting a lot of people, and causing a lot of flame wars. Patience can be your friend.
Please demonstrate some harm caused by having "excessive" categories on an article. Assume that all the categories are correctly used: the article belongs to the category, and none of the categories are mutually redundant.
Steve
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Cool Cat wrote:
I guess I am taking things for granted too fast... Any recent US president has way too many categories. They are merely the example symptoms of the problem.
But what exactly is "too many categories"? _Why_ is that number of categories "too many"? The only times I can recall encountering articles and thinking "this article has too many categories" it was because the article was redundantly categorized, not because of just the raw number.
Getting rid of some of these excess categories is something hard to do. Of course this isn't a battle, but people are often emotionally motivated on a number of topics and they sometimes create categories for that end. Especially if a person does not understands the spirit of NPOV, we end up having categories with not very objective titles and a subjective inclusion criteria.
Categories with bad titles or inclusion criteria should be renamed or deleted, true, but this is a separate issue from how many categories in total there are.
An average cfd discussions get very little attention unless it is on a controversial issue. In your average cfd on a potentially controversial issue, people tend to vote based on their belief system and not based on stuff like usefulness/objectivity/subjectivity of the inclusion criteria of the category in question. For example, although a word to avoid, [[Category:Terrorists by nationality]] has been around for quite sometime.
I've just read a bunch of the CfDs in this area (I'm sure you have too since you initiated several of them, but for the benefit of other editors see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Terrorists) and I'm wondering how you're determining whose "votes" are based on their belief systems and whose are based on usefulness/etc. I've seen several opinions supporting keeping the category that appear to me to be based on usefulness etc.
But we seem to be straying from the original subject here, which is the "too many categories" thing. Or are you suggesting that the reason we have too many categories is because it's too hard to delete them via existing mechanisms? If so, it looks like the old deletionism/inclusionism dilemma transported to another namespace.
Cool Cat wrote:
So do you have a suggestion to tackle/quick attack the problem? CfD is a slow and inefficient procedure to get rid of nonsense. Too many panic/contradictory "Keep" votes just pile up in almost an instant.
How do you distinguish the "panic/contradictory" keeps from the "reasoned/consistent" keeps?
If you really think a category should go, take the time to write a full argument for it and don't worry so much if the CfD ends up going the other way. There was once a category on Wikipedia that I felt was deserving of deletion and I spent a lot of effort banging my head against a wall on CfD trying to convince some "keep" voters of my correctness, without success. But ultimately a year or so later, after everyone had wandered off to other things, someone else came along and CfDed it again and the category quietly passed away. If a category is truly deserving of deletion then eventually it's going to happen. We're not on a deadline.
True, but waiting makes things worse. Similar categories are morphed because the category exists. In that sense we do have a deadline.
Maybe a "Wikiproject Categorization" would be a better solution... Any opinions? Does such a wikiproject exist?
- Cool Cat
On 2/9/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Cool Cat wrote:
So do you have a suggestion to tackle/quick attack the problem? CfD is a slow and inefficient procedure to get rid of nonsense. Too many panic/contradictory "Keep" votes just pile up in almost an instant.
How do you distinguish the "panic/contradictory" keeps from the "reasoned/consistent" keeps?
If you really think a category should go, take the time to write a full argument for it and don't worry so much if the CfD ends up going the other way. There was once a category on Wikipedia that I felt was deserving of deletion and I spent a lot of effort banging my head against a wall on CfD trying to convince some "keep" voters of my correctness, without success. But ultimately a year or so later, after everyone had wandered off to other things, someone else came along and CfDed it again and the category quietly passed away. If a category is truly deserving of deletion then eventually it's going to happen. We're not on a deadline.
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On 2/9/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
I quite agree. Pride is a fine thing, but I remain unconvinced that many people want a navigational aid to all the notable people who are or might have been gay / Jewish / Methylated Wesletarian / whatever; much more likely that they will go along thinking "I am gay / Jewish / Methylated Wesletarian / whatever, show me that lots of famous people
Obviously they're not useful as navigational aids. They're intended as *tags*. But since MediaWiki doesn't do tags, categories are the best we have. I would suggest keeping them on until we have a better solution - whether useful for navigating or not.
Steve