On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
I was checking out [[Template:Lifetime]], which seems
to be in a state
of flux, and was surprised to read
"Since Categories are preferred to be listed in most-common order, the
Lifetime template should generally be placed after the last Category tag
..."
Huh? I've always seen Template:Lifetime placed with DEFAULTSORT before
the categories. What reason is there to change that? Certainly not the
order of categories (which no-one ever seems to be able to decide on).
Have there been other changes as well?
WP:CAT has:
"The order in which categories are placed on a page is not governed by
any single rule (for example, it does not need to be alphabetical).
Normally the most essential, significant categories are listed first."
Which makes more sense to me, as representing the traditional view.
Agreed.
Calling birth and death dates somehow less essential
than other
categories rather jars with my feelings.
Well, not essential, but it makes sense to me to group categories,
especially on pages where there are 30-50 categories. Hidden
categories are an example of categories being grouped separately from
other categories. "Living people" is arguable a tracker category,
rather than a normal category. And things like "birth year" and "death
year" are arguably "metadata" categories, or "date categories" -
as
opposed to (say) "location" categories or "award" categories or
"career" (positions held and so on) categories.
Of course, this is all for people. And gets duplicated in template
footers and infoboxes.
For other articles, you have similar date categories ("establishment
year") and location categories and "type" categories. There *are*
broad logical groupings of categories, but how to incorporate that
into layout and the category structure has never really taken hold or
been possible.
The closest I saw was the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Category_types
But that didn't seem to gain any ground. Maybe someone might want to
take another look?
Carcharoth