on 5/1/07 5:11 PM, Andrew Gray at shimgray(a)gmail.com wrote: Do you, personally, use the current WP categorization system?

All I am asking, in this age of creative technology, is that someone step up and create a system that can meet the needs of as many of our readers as possible.

On 02/05/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: ...from the point of view of a high-level specialised reader who wants to do somewhat complex searches on datasets, though, not from the point of view of the average user. Very different beasts. My problem is this: we cannot revamp the entire system to meet your needs, in the way you suggest, *without breaking it for everyone else*; we cannot start increasing the number and size of categories without making them much harder to use as a navigational tool. Basically, there's a division here between metadata and search. Categories are metadata, applied to the individual articles. Opening a category and looking at it is a very crude form of search, surprising though it may seem at a first glance; it tells you all the articles listed under that particular heading. You want to do a more advanced form of search, on a larger scale than simple navigation, producing results like "all rivers in Eurasia" or "all people who were born in the 20th century". There are two ways to do this: a) Add more metadata, but keep the existing 'search'. Start slapping on more categories onto articles, so that - to pick an example - "1987 births" is joined by "1980s births" and "20th century births" b) Get a better search, but keep the existing metadata. Develop a search system that can parse the existing categories, combine them in various ways, and spit out a list for the researcher. (a) is quick and dirty, but has problems; it makes it harder to navigate the existing category system from the point of view of the normal reader. It also rapidly becomes unworkable if we start thinking about more complex searches than just "the members of all daughter categories" - imagine if we had "1980s births of folk singers" and "20th century births of folk singers" and all the other possible intersections of the already-existing categories being added to pages! There are just so many possible category intersections for any given page... this really won't scale. (b) is elegant, and scales well. It has the major advantage of being completely disassociated from the metadata, unlike our existing 'search' method, as it's overlaid on top; it doesn't impact in any way the existing system beyond perhaps making us streamline and rationalise it a little. Unfortunately, it needs someone to go write it. This is what's holding things up. And all I'm asking is that if we're wanting to create a system, we create a system, we don't try to make the existing one sort-of-useful for everyone at the price of making it not-really-useful to anyone :-) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Andrew, Do you, personally, use the current WP categorization system?

On 5/1/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: > Andrew, > > Do you, personally, use the current WP categorization system?

on 5/2/07 11:09 AM, cohesion at cohesion(a)sleepyhead.org wrote:

To answer a question not addressed to me, I use it constantly, but they are all template driven date-based work queues or image license categories.

On 5/2/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: > My needs are a bit different. Repeating (for the upteenth time :-)): Joe > Smith died from Cancer; specifically, liver cancer. I want to be able to > call up all of the persons who died from cancer, then call up all who died > from liver cancer - two separate searches - two separate lists. As WP is > constructed now, to do this, both the Categories "Cancer" and "Liver cancer" > must be entered in Joe's Article. It's really not that complicated.

True, but if we did that, where would I look for articles about cancer in general? I'm thinking [[Paraneoplastic syndrome]], [[Radiation therapy]], [[Breast cancer]], [[Liver cancer]].

I think that the lesson is that 'as WP is constructed now' isn't sufficient to serve everyone.

I think that this sort of issue has been mentioned to you several times. Did you have any suggestion as to how this difficulty would be overcome

or are you only promoting that categories ought to work in the way that is most convenient for you?

I will preface this all with saying I don't take much part in the on-wiki category discussions, but here's how I would fix it: 1. Forget any concept of hierarchy (except when obviously useful) It's never going to be a large scale hierarchy, so don't try. 2. Stop worrying about having too many categories on a particular article. Maybe every single person *should* be in [[Category:People]] why not?

That or use semantic mediawiki and say [[died from::cancer]] in the article, but no one likes that idea for some reason.

On 5/2/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote: Sounds great :)

On 30/04/07, charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: what users explicit. 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. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

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?

> 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.

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.

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?

On 02/05/07, K P <kpbotany(a)gmail.com> wrote: obvious if Categorisation on Commons is an *entirely* different kettle of fish, one which as far as I am aware is in flux right now, and one I don't even begin to try to pretend to understand. Perhaps this might be better asked to commons-l? find from intention, for Wikipedia, space? On Wikipedia, they exist for readers. I see readers using them. As a reader, I use them (occasionally). On Commons, the entire concept of what a user is, what a user is looking for, is different. I wouldn't like to try to insist both work in the same way. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

And all I'm asking is that if we're wanting to create a system, we create a system, we don't try to make the existing one sort-of-useful for everyone at the price of making it not-really-useful to anyone :-)

K P wrote: I expect the way this would be done according to existing common practice on Wikipedia would be to create subcategories for those five genera with lots of members, and then the remaining thousand species that each belong to their own genera would remain under the root family category. People don't generally create categories that will only ever hold one or two articles, there's no point.

For example, there are lots of people from Dresden, so we have a [[Category:People from Dresden]] subcategory of [[Category:People from Saxony]]. But people from small towns in Saxony just go in the main People from Saxony category; there's no [[Category:People from Zörbig]] subcategory with [[Johann Jakob Reiske]] as the sole member.

On 04/05/07, Earle Martin <wikipedia(a)downlode.org> wrote: Until we come up with a Semantic MediaWiki syntax that's intuitively usable by mere mortals.

Bryan Derksen wrote: > K P wrote: > > >> 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. >> >> > I expect the way this would be done according to existing common > practice on Wikipedia would be to create subcategories for those five > genera with lots of members, and then the remaining thousand species > that each belong to their own genera would remain under the root family > category. People don't generally create categories that will only ever > hold one or two articles, there's no point. >

I'm sure we have many category specialists who are not easily deterred by the pointlessness of their efforts. :-)

On 5/2/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: Then you've articficially, uniquely and originally to Wikipedia created groups that don't exist elsewhere.

Is this acceptable, that you group organisms in ways they aren't already grouped, and when do you do it, and when not?

The problem is that these genera are probably already sorted in some level of groups, tribes or other, that aren't necessarily used. So, what if two of the big genera belong to one group, but they've been given their own category, and some of the singular genera, belong in various other groups, but have been grouped together, artificially, and originally, by Wikipedia editors?

The problem is that categories in taxonomy mean something, whether Linnaean or phylogenetic. Nature didn't sort them like Wikipedia wants them, in nice tidy groups. When you group organisms you are implying that they belong together for some reason, such as they are evolutionarily closer to each other than to members of other groups. Any time you use a classification system based on something else, you can't extrapolate a different type of classification system into what you are doing. If organisms are categorized according to taxonomical systems, then Wikipedia editors can't come in and, because of the convenience of or need for categorization, add a layer of unrelated groupings to the system.

In botany we create categories all the time that will only ever hold one or two articles simply because of this, we categorize by families into orders, and some orders have many families, others only one, we classify genera into families, and some families have 20,000 genera, others only one. Taxonomical systems group organisms based upon morphological similarities or upon evolutionary relationships. Nature didn't order evolution by numbers, only 10 allowed here, 20 there. So, either we use existing taxonomical systems, and then Wikipedia has to commit to not altering them (what the librarian suggested so readily), or we don't use existing taxonomical systems of categorizing organisms and simply make up our own original system. But what we can't use part taxonomy and part something we use to accomodate categorization on Wikipedia.