Puppy wrote
It seems to me a good point has been made - if you want all suicides, then having to traverse all subcats is tedious, to say the least.
I have occasionally wanted this feature: flatten out all subcategories of something into a list. I hope we see it.
That does not mean that I want [[Category:Mathematics]] to consist of 15000 pages. How would that help anyone? I have actually done work, on [[Category:Set theory]] (where I was thanked) and [[Category:Fluid dynamics]] (perhaps unnoticed) on getting useful subcategories; which then can sit inside two or more higher-level categories. This all adds to the convenience of the user. It is quite a good idea, in many cases, to consider splitting categories which have gone 'over the page'.
Charles
----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.ntlworld.com Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information
It is beginning to dawn on me (perhaps the sun rises later here) that there is/would be a great difference between categorizing biographical articles v. non-biographical ones. The biographical would require much less complex layers. Any thoughts on this?
Marc
From: charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 22:17:05 +0000 To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Hello
Puppy wrote
It seems to me a good point has been made - if you want all suicides, then having to traverse all subcats is tedious, to say the least.
I have occasionally wanted this feature: flatten out all subcategories of something into a list. I hope we see it.
That does not mean that I want [[Category:Mathematics]] to consist of 15000 pages. How would that help anyone? I have actually done work, on [[Category:Set theory]] (where I was thanked) and [[Category:Fluid dynamics]] (perhaps unnoticed) on getting useful subcategories; which then can sit inside two or more higher-level categories. This all adds to the convenience of the user. It is quite a good idea, in many cases, to consider splitting categories which have gone 'over the page'.
Charles
Email sent from www.ntlworld.com Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 12/13/06, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com
That does not mean that I want [[Category:Mathematics]] to consist of 15000 pages. How would that help anyone? I have actually done work, on [[Category:Set theory]] (where I was thanked) and [[Category:Fluid dynamics]] (perhaps unnoticed) on getting useful subcategories; which then can sit inside two or more higher-level categories. This all adds to the convenience of the user. It is quite a good idea, in many cases, to consider splitting categories which have gone 'over the page'.
Purely and simply, categories are useful for many things they weren't designed for or intended to do. Remember, they were a cute hack invented by Magnus a couple of years ago in the face of some pretty serious skepticism.
I don't think it would take much to make them much more powerful, but as long as most people think they're primarily a navigational tool, using them to record all kinds of attributes about the subjects of articles is going to run into a lot of criticism. As it already does.
Steve
On 13/12/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Purely and simply, categories are useful for many things they weren't designed for or intended to do. Remember, they were a cute hack invented by Magnus a couple of years ago in the face of some pretty serious skepticism.
To give credit where credit is due, categories were actually invented a decade ago by Stan Silver for the WikiWikiWeb [1]. The difficulties of indicating "isness" and hierarchical category structure have been a topic of much discussion ever since. [2,3]
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/19961129234150/c2.com/cgi/wiki?AboutCategoriesAnd... [2] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiIsNotaTree [3] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LimitsOfHierarchies
charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
That does not mean that I want [[Category:Mathematics]] to consist of 15000 pages. How would that help anyone?
This seems to be an extremely widespread and popular fallacy. "/I/ can't think of any use for it, therefore we mustn't have it." Could you all please think about this for 1 second and realise that it's a total fallacy?
Timwi wrote:
charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
That does not mean that I want [[Category:Mathematics]] to consist of 15000 pages. How would that help anyone?
This seems to be an extremely widespread and popular fallacy. "/I/ can't think of any use for it, therefore we mustn't have it." Could you all please think about this for 1 second and realise that it's a total fallacy?
"No use for it" and "no help to anyone" are still different questions. We need to distinguish between the content itself and how we organise it. Huge categories are subject to the law of diminishing returns. If a Google search gives you 1,000,000 hits it doesn't help anyone to go through them all, so you develop strategies to seriously trim the results.
Being able to collapse or expand categories would be a great feature.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
"No use for it" and "no help to anyone" are still different questions. We need to distinguish between the content itself and how we organise it. Huge categories are subject to the law of diminishing returns. If a Google search gives you 1,000,000 hits it doesn't help anyone to go through them all, so you develop strategies to seriously trim the results.
You appear to be comparing Google search results with a Category page, which do not compare at all because Google search results are not organised and don't have subcategories.
The current situation is something like this: Category X has no articles and 20 sub-categories, all the articles that "are an X" are in one of those sub-categories.
The proposed change is: Category X contains all the articles that "are an X", while also containing the 20 sub-categories, listed prominently at the top of the page.
I don't think anyone can reasonably deny that this is strictly an improvement, no matter how little. Someone who *really wants* the entire list of X'es can now have it, and someone who doesn't can still browse the sub-categories as before. Nothing has been taken away.
Timwi
Timwi,
YES!!!!!! My cry wasn't in the wilderness after all. THANK YOU!!
Marc Riddell
From: Timwi timwi@gmx.net Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 17:43:34 +0000 To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Hello
Ray Saintonge wrote:
"No use for it" and "no help to anyone" are still different questions. We need to distinguish between the content itself and how we organise it. Huge categories are subject to the law of diminishing returns. If a Google search gives you 1,000,000 hits it doesn't help anyone to go through them all, so you develop strategies to seriously trim the results.
You appear to be comparing Google search results with a Category page, which do not compare at all because Google search results are not organised and don't have subcategories.
The current situation is something like this: Category X has no articles and 20 sub-categories, all the articles that "are an X" are in one of those sub-categories.
The proposed change is: Category X contains all the articles that "are an X", while also containing the 20 sub-categories, listed prominently at the top of the page.
I don't think anyone can reasonably deny that this is strictly an improvement, no matter how little. Someone who *really wants* the entire list of X'es can now have it, and someone who doesn't can still browse the sub-categories as before. Nothing has been taken away.
Timwi
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I don't think anyone can reasonably deny that this is strictly an improvement, no matter how little. Someone who *really wants* the entire list of X'es can now have it, and someone who doesn't can still browse the sub-categories as before. Nothing has been taken away.
Timwi
Yes, this would be good. But better navigation for categories with large numbers of items would be good. Thousands per page if necessary...
Steve
Please bear with me, as I am still learning where to respond to these discussions so as to insert it into the proper position in the train of conversation. Here, I want to respond to Steve & Timwi. Both of you seem to support my original idea of placing a main Category & a subcategory into the same article so that the article appears in both lists. Thank you for that. Getting back to the basic argument & to stay grounded in this, what is the argument some still have against, say, adding the Category: Cancer deaths & the Sub-category: Lung cancer into the same Article? OR, somehow having the software be able to gather all of the articles with the various cancer subcats. into one master Cancer deaths list? Forgive me if I seem to be repeating old material, but, I believe these basic issues need to be kept out in front.
Thanks,
Marc
From: "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2006 10:29:01 +1100 To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Hello
I don't think anyone can reasonably deny that this is strictly an improvement, no matter how little. Someone who *really wants* the entire list of X'es can now have it, and someone who doesn't can still browse the sub-categories as before. Nothing has been taken away.
Timwi
Yes, this would be good. But better navigation for categories with large numbers of items would be good. Thousands per page if necessary...
Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Marc Riddell wrote:
Getting back to the basic argument & to stay grounded in this, what is the argument some still have against, say, adding the Category: Cancer deaths & the Sub-category: Lung cancer into the same Article? OR, somehow having the software be able to gather all of the articles with the various cancer subcats. into one master Cancer deaths list?
This is a prime example of something I keep observing on Wikipedia. There are loads of arguments to change something, and very few (if any!) arguments to keep the current behaviour, and yet people still leave the current behaviour simply because they are afraid of changing it. Even if someone goes in and changes it, someone will change it back, simply because "this is how we've always done it". This is the irrationality of humans at work, and it's the main thing that discourages me from doing anything big on Wikipedia as I used to in the past.
Timwi