Marc Riddell wrote
I have sworn off Categories. I have taken the pledge. From now on I won't even look at the bottom of an Article.
I use a skin making the categories display at the top. I can't imagine life with them at the bottom.
Charles
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Marc Riddell wrote
I have sworn off Categories. I have taken the pledge. From now on I won't even look at the bottom of an Article.
on 4/10/07 10:02 AM, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com at charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I use a skin making the categories display at the top. I can't imagine life with them at the bottom.
Charles
And have them in my face as the first thing I see!?! PASS! :-)
As you can see from the last days' posts, so much for my pledge! I'd be headed for rehab. but I don't have the celebrity for admission ;-).
Seriously, folks, thank you for all of your truly intelligent, insightful and very helpful input about this.
Perhaps we need to get back to a basic question: What was the original intention in creating the WP Category System? What was its original purpose?
Marc
On 10/04/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
Perhaps we need to get back to a basic question: What was the original intention in creating the WP Category System? What was its original purpose?
Pretty much "Oh, that looks cool!" ;-)
How to use it pretty much evolved. No-one directed the effort. Directing it came later.
- d.
On 10/04/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
Perhaps we need to get back to a basic question: What was the original intention in creating the WP Category System? What was its original purpose?
The Wikipedia system followed from the WikiWikiWeb category system, which was developed in 1996 to categorize pages on that wiki. For historical context, see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CategoriesDiscussion , and some of the pages linked from this archived page: http://web.archive.org/web/19961129234150/http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AboutCatego... , followed by http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_category_schemes and its associated talk page.
on 4/10/07 1:19 PM, Earle Martin at wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
The Wikipedia system followed from the WikiWikiWeb category system, which was developed in 1996 to categorize pages on that wiki. For historical context, see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CategoriesDiscussion , and some of the pages linked from this archived page: http://web.archive.org/web/19961129234150/http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AboutCatego... esAndTopics , followed by http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_category_schemes and its associated talk page.
Earle,
Thank you very much for this.
Marc
The issue I have with the "categories should be more like tags" comment that is posted almost identically every few weeks is that it assumes that if tags "happen", they'll be able to easily display results for combinations of tags... but assumes that categories can't display their subcontents, when the latter is probably easier than the former.
The thing about articles being sorted out of their main categories is that for categories like People, American people, Writers, etc., they're ludicrously huge. If articles were in all relevant categories with the current software, it'd be unworkable.
What I'd like to see technically is: 1) subcategories not being pushed to later pages by articles in the category. If a category contains two subcategories: "A" and "Z" and 200 articles starting with letters A-Y, Z appears on the second page. This makes article-full categories unnavigable. All the subcategories should come before any of the articles. 2) By default, categories only display articles which are not in any of their subcategories, but have a "show all articles in this category" link (which'd probably amount to a "&show=all" link). Using this would require a little better "hierarchy hygiene", though... whether subcategories are really /sub/categories... but we need that anyway. 3) If 2 were implemented, a "would be nice" option, that I fear might be more work on the server, would be to have a button/link next to each subcategory (like the tree [+]/[-] there now) that would add the articles in that subcategory to the displayed list of articles in the category.
-- Jake Nelson [[en:User:Jake Nelson]]
On 4/11/07, Jake Nelson duskwave@gmail.com wrote:
The thing about articles being sorted out of their main categories is that for categories like People, American people, Writers, etc., they're ludicrously huge. If articles were in all relevant categories with the current software, it'd be unworkable.
The only thing that is "unworkable" is attempting to browse the complete list. We do already have some massive categories, such as Category:Living people.
What I'd like to see technically is:
- subcategories not being pushed to later pages by articles in the
category. If a category contains two subcategories: "A" and "Z" and 200 articles starting with letters A-Y, Z appears on the second page. This makes article-full categories unnavigable. All the subcategories should come before any of the articles.
I hadn't noticed that. If true, that's crappy behaviour.
- By default, categories only display articles which are not in any
of their subcategories, but have a "show all articles in this category" link (which'd probably amount to a "&show=all" link). Using this would require a little better "hierarchy hygiene", though... whether subcategories are really /sub/categories... but we need that anyway.
Yeah. Now that I think about it, this should be a property on the category link:
[[Category:Parentcat||Include]] maybe
- If 2 were implemented, a "would be nice" option, that I fear might
be more work on the server, would be to have a button/link next to each subcategory (like the tree [+]/[-] there now) that would add the articles in that subcategory to the displayed list of articles in the category.
It would be much more than "nice", it's pretty much necessary. I wouldn't worry about the workload. We have flat categories with thousands of articles, and we have hierarchical categories with 5 subcats and a total of 30 articles. Spewing out an entire hierarchical category of tens of thousands of articles on one page would be "work", but not very useful either.
Steve
Marc Riddell wrote:
And have them in my face as the first thing I see!?! PASS! :-)
I note that in the Classic skin the categories are wrapped in <p class='catlinks'></p> when displayed but that #catlinks {display: none;} in my standard.css doesn't make it disappear like I was able to do with #stub {display:none;}
Stubs are wrapped in <div class="notice metadata" id="stub"></div>. How easy would it be to add a similar div to the category links? That way people who really hate categories and find them nothing but clutter can make them go away.
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Marc Riddell wrote:
And have them in my face as the first thing I see!?! PASS! :-)
I note that in the Classic skin the categories are wrapped in <p class='catlinks'></p> when displayed but that #catlinks {display: none;} in my standard.css doesn't make it disappear like I was able to do with #stub {display:none;}
Stubs are wrapped in <div class="notice metadata" id="stub"></div>. How easy would it be to add a similar div to the category links? That way people who really hate categories and find them nothing but clutter can make them go away.
I like having them at the top in the Classic skin. Perhaps an option to have them at the top, bottom or side-bar could be helpful.
Ec