About "Women" on Wikipedia, I think "famous" is probably problematic, like "list of short women", is too much based on a judgement call.
And a list of all women on wikipedia would be too enormous. However I would think no one would object to something like Women by Nationality and then have a sub-cat for each nation. That you'd just have to all up everyone in that cat.
Will
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WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
About "Women" on Wikipedia, I think "famous" is probably problematic, like "list of short women", is too much based on a judgement call.
Heck, in a few cases the "Women" classification might prove to be based on a judgement call. The panoply of transgender classifications and how they change over time and culture is beyond me. Trying to hammer every peg into one of just two holes is bound to cause problems.
Not saying it wouldn't be nice to categorize those that _aren't_ edge cases, mind you.
Trying to hammer every peg into one of just two holes is bound to cause problems.
Then there's the issue of people who are inter-sexed (born with mixed or absent gender-specific organs, example being [[Jim Sinclair]]), genderfuck (intentionally ignoring gender-specific cultural expectations), cross-dressers, and generally anybody else who doesn't fit neatly into "male" or "female". This isn't a representation of Wikipedia, but society in general.
Emily On Aug 8, 2009, at 9:06 PM, Bryan Derksen wrote:
WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
About "Women" on Wikipedia, I think "famous" is probably problematic, like "list of short women", is too much based on a judgement call.
Heck, in a few cases the "Women" classification might prove to be based on a judgement call. The panoply of transgender classifications and how they change over time and culture is beyond me. Trying to hammer every peg into one of just two holes is bound to cause problems.
Not saying it wouldn't be nice to categorize those that _aren't_ edge cases, mind you.
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On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 3:24 AM, Emily Monroebluecaliocean@me.com wrote:
Trying to hammer every peg into one of just two holes is bound to cause problems.
Then there's the issue of people who are inter-sexed (born with mixed or absent gender-specific organs, example being [[Jim Sinclair]]), genderfuck (intentionally ignoring gender-specific cultural expectations), cross-dressers, and generally anybody else who doesn't fit neatly into "male" or "female". This isn't a representation of Wikipedia, but society in general.
I've never understood this argument.
Just because a vanishingly small minority of people can't be classified as male or female, that is a reason to not bother doing such classifications? If that was a valid argument, many of these information forms that people fill in wouldn't ask for your gender. Those forms usually give a third or fourth option for those who don't identify as male or female, so that is what Wikipedia would do as well.
If anyone could hazard a guess at how many of the 725,635 biographies we have where there might be a dispute over gender, that would be good (note that for some reason that figure, from the "WikiProject Biography" statistics, includes music groups, and also some other "group biographies", rather than "single biographies"). But really, if it is only a couple of hundred where the gender is disputed or not known, then there should be no objection to classifying the others by gender.
Carcharoth
Just because a vanishingly small minority of people can't be classified as male or female, that is a reason to not bother doing such classifications? If that was a valid argument, many of these information forms that people fill in wouldn't ask for your gender. Those forms usually give a third or fourth option for those who don't identify as male or female, so that is what Wikipedia would do as well.
The forms I have filled--and I'm nineteen, so that also includes the forms my parents have filled on my behalf and showed me--if they asked about gender, gave two options. Male, female. Check the one that applies. No "Well, it's complicated" checkbox. I've seen one form that didn't, and that was the form my dad fills out for his job as a HIV tester and counselor. The form had four options, two of which was "transexual", and included which gender the person was transitioning into.
I was going to suggest the alternative categories, as well. I was tired, though--my bad. Have a "Wikipedian by gender" category, then have "male" "female", "intersexual", "transsexual", "this is a gender- integrated group biography" etc. as sub-categories.
Emily On Aug 9, 2009, at 5:30 AM, Carcharoth wrote:
On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 3:24 AM, Emily Monroebluecaliocean@me.com wrote:
Trying to hammer every peg into one of just two holes is bound to cause problems.
Then there's the issue of people who are inter-sexed (born with mixed or absent gender-specific organs, example being [[Jim Sinclair]]), genderfuck (intentionally ignoring gender-specific cultural expectations), cross-dressers, and generally anybody else who doesn't fit neatly into "male" or "female". This isn't a representation of Wikipedia, but society in general.
I've never understood this argument.
Just because a vanishingly small minority of people can't be classified as male or female, that is a reason to not bother doing such classifications? If that was a valid argument, many of these information forms that people fill in wouldn't ask for your gender. Those forms usually give a third or fourth option for those who don't identify as male or female, so that is what Wikipedia would do as well.
If anyone could hazard a guess at how many of the 725,635 biographies we have where there might be a dispute over gender, that would be good (note that for some reason that figure, from the "WikiProject Biography" statistics, includes music groups, and also some other "group biographies", rather than "single biographies"). But really, if it is only a couple of hundred where the gender is disputed or not known, then there should be no objection to classifying the others by gender.
Carcharoth
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2009/8/9 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
If anyone could hazard a guess at how many of the 725,635 biographies we have where there might be a dispute over gender, that would be good (note that for some reason that figure, from the "WikiProject Biography" statistics, includes music groups, and also some other "group biographies", rather than "single biographies"). But really, if it is only a couple of hundred where the gender is disputed or not known, then there should be no objection to classifying the others by gender.
Okay, estimate time!
When LibraryThing began their "common knowledge" cataloging program - essentially an attempt to gather structured information on books and authors via a user-editable database - they tangled briefly with the problem of gender for authors.
On the one hand, it's a very important detail to record, if only from a pragmatic perspective - hang around a bookshop or a library and see how long until someone starts looking for "a female crime novelist", etc. For practical reasons, they wanted it a restricted "this field has value X" record rather than free-text, which was used for almost everything else.
On the other hand, it's even more complex for books than for our biographies, as many books are authored by someone about whom even the most basic biographical information is unknown, or who isn't a real person at all, before we even worry about people who don't fit the normal classifications.
In the end, they went with a fourfold structure:
* male * female * other/contested/unknown * n/a
The third was for those who are people who don't fit neatly into the first two, for whatever reason; the fourth was for corporate bodies, and so also served as a way to differentiate real people and not-real people.
This is quite handy, because the ratio of the third to the first two gives us some idea of what we're likely to encounter in Wikipedia - it won't be the same, but it'll be the right order of magnitude. There are currently 8,736 "n/a", 57,047 "female", 118,069 "male"... and 431 "other". Roughly speaking, that's 0.25% of catalogued people aren't defined neatly as male or female. Scaling that up to Wikipedia would mean we'd be looking at, at most, 1,500 to 2,000 biographies where we shouldn't simply do male/female.
Given that not all the "other" cases are people who fall outside the binary - the data is a bit choppy and includes some who should be n/a, plus oddities like joint pseudonyms - our proportion would probably be lower. The chronological weighting of the two datasets complicates matters; a set of authors will skew towards modernity, but then again more than half our biographies are BLPs, so we ourselves also skew towards modernity. I can't say which of those is the stronger pull!
So I think, all told, we're going to be looking at a few more than a couple of hundred, but perhaps not more than a thousand cases. If we're consciously trying to get good coverage of people who fall outside the usual classification, and addressing those articles rigorously - itself not a bad idea - we might end up pushing a couple of thousand.
2009/8/9 WJhonson@aol.com:
About "Women" on Wikipedia, I think "famous" is probably problematic, like "list of short women", is too much based on a judgement call. And a list of all women on wikipedia would be too enormous. However I would think no one would object to something like Women by Nationality and then have a sub-cat for each nation. That you'd just have to all up everyone in that cat.
The problem being discussed in this thread would be solved by the feature (much-desired by Commons) of turning categories into tags - so that e.g. [[Category:Left-handed dead Jewish lesbian presidents of the United States]] could become a query combining a pile of tags, rather than a ridiculously specific sub-sub-category as we have now.
The nice thing is that going from the tiny sub-sub-cats to a query on tags can be done gradually without a lot of disruption.
At the moment a test version of this feature worked like a dream in PostgreSQL, but failed miserably in MySQL, 'cos MySQL is shit. Unfortunately, it's also what Wikimedia runs on. People are working on workarounds at various rates.
- d.
On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 12:47 PM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The problem being discussed in this thread would be solved by the feature (much-desired by Commons) of turning categories into tags - so that e.g. [[Category:Left-handed dead Jewish lesbian presidents of the United States]] could become a query combining a pile of tags, rather than a ridiculously specific sub-sub-category as we have now.
So would tags replace categories or work alongside?
2009/8/9 Bod Notbod bodnotbod@gmail.com:
On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 12:47 PM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The problem being discussed in this thread would be solved by the feature (much-desired by Commons) of turning categories into tags - so that e.g. [[Category:Left-handed dead Jewish lesbian presidents of the United States]] could become a query combining a pile of tags, rather than a ridiculously specific sub-sub-category as we have now.
So would tags replace categories or work alongside?
Ideally, they'd work much as cats do now, but you could easily run Boolean queries on them without MediaWiki falling over.
The application for Commons is obvious - minute sub-sub-cats are not nearly as useful for an image database as tags. But the same thing could be applied to a text encyclopedia quite productively.
Another useful aspect for Commons would be one tag having multiple names - which solves the present problem that most things on Commons are categorised in English, which is completely inadequate for an image repository for projects in any language, and particulary for ones like es:wp which store *all* their images on Commons. For a text encyclopedia that could resolve some arguments about what to call a category, or at least provide a working equivalent of category redirects.
(I just looked through Bugzilla and "tag" appears to mean something else in internal MediaWiki jargon. But that's basically the idea. Extensive wishing about this in the commons-l and wikitech-l archives. No-one has a deployment-ready version of the feature yet - the closest anyone's come is using Lucene as the back end, which basically requires a server all to itself - so the whole thing's currently wishful vapour and probably awaiting a genius with MySQL tweaking to write it.)
- d.
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:53 AM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/8/9 Bod Notbod bodnotbod@gmail.com:
On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 12:47 PM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The problem being discussed in this thread would be solved by the feature (much-desired by Commons) of turning categories into tags - so that e.g. [[Category:Left-handed dead Jewish lesbian presidents of the United States]] could become a query combining a pile of tags, rather than a ridiculously specific sub-sub-category as we have now.
So would tags replace categories or work alongside?
Ideally, they'd work much as cats do now, but you could easily run Boolean queries on them without MediaWiki falling over.
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/catscan_rewrite.php?categories=1912+births%0D%...
Cheers, Magnus
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:24 PM, Magnus Manskemagnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:53 AM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/8/9 Bod Notbod bodnotbod@gmail.com:
On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 12:47 PM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The problem being discussed in this thread would be solved by the feature (much-desired by Commons) of turning categories into tags - so that e.g. [[Category:Left-handed dead Jewish lesbian presidents of the United States]] could become a query combining a pile of tags, rather than a ridiculously specific sub-sub-category as we have now.
So would tags replace categories or work alongside?
Ideally, they'd work much as cats do now, but you could easily run Boolean queries on them without MediaWiki falling over.
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/catscan_rewrite.php?categories=1912+births%0D%...
Looks good.
Trouble is that the category system in place at the moment duplicates things a lot.
To get the English WW1 historians, I had to intersect:
*English historians *World War I historians
To get:
A. J. P. Taylor John Keegan Martin Gilbert
But if I want European historians, that's not possible unless you know the country categories you want and unify them. And I can think of other searches that are not possible because of the way the categories are set up at the moment.
But that beta V 2.0 of catscan does look really good! :-)
Is there a summary of what's changed?
One thing: when selecting depth, sometimes you want one category to be 0 depth, but the other category to be a different depth. Is that not possible?
Carcharoth
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
Is there a summary of what's changed?
Well, it's completely new, so check out the manual link on the page, and the original requirements, which have been met or exceeded: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMDE_contract_offers/Rewrite_CatScan
(note that, once my beta did all that was required, this contract offer was retracted)
One thing: when selecting depth, sometimes you want one category to be 0 depth, but the other category to be a different depth. Is that not possible?
It's explained on the manual page - just append "|2" to the category you want to use with a different depth (in this example, 2).
Cheers, Magnus
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Magnus Manskemagnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
<snip>
It's explained on the manual page - just append "|2" to the category you want to use with a different depth (in this example, 2).
<blush>
Would you believe I completely missed that link to the manual? :-/
Carcharoth
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Magnus Manskemagnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
Is there a summary of what's changed?
Well, it's completely new, so check out the manual link on the page, and the original requirements, which have been met or exceeded: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMDE_contract_offers/Rewrite_CatScan
(note that, once my beta did all that was required, this contract offer was retracted)
One thing: when selecting depth, sometimes you want one category to be 0 depth, but the other category to be a different depth. Is that not possible?
It's explained on the manual page - just append "|2" to the category you want to use with a different depth (in this example, 2).
On closer examination, I don't think I can do what I'm trying to do with that tool.
I want to take a category tree of WikiProject tagged articles (containing pages tagged in the talk namespace), and compare to a category tree of articles tagged in the article space (normal, reader-facing categories). And see where the overlap or lack of overlap is. That requires some option to ignore namespaces when comparing page names, OR for the "check for template" bit to have an option to check the talk page of the articles in the category, rather than the actual pages in the category. Can this tool do that?
Carcharoth
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Magnus Manskemagnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
Is there a summary of what's changed?
Well, it's completely new, so check out the manual link on the page, and the original requirements, which have been met or exceeded: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMDE_contract_offers/Rewrite_CatScan
(note that, once my beta did all that was required, this contract offer was retracted)
One thing: when selecting depth, sometimes you want one category to be 0 depth, but the other category to be a different depth. Is that not possible?
It's explained on the manual page - just append "|2" to the category you want to use with a different depth (in this example, 2).
On closer examination, I don't think I can do what I'm trying to do with that tool.
I want to take a category tree of WikiProject tagged articles (containing pages tagged in the talk namespace), and compare to a category tree of articles tagged in the article space (normal, reader-facing categories). And see where the overlap or lack of overlap is. That requires some option to ignore namespaces when comparing page names, OR for the "check for template" bit to have an option to check the talk page of the articles in the category, rather than the actual pages in the category. Can this tool do that?
Not in its current form. You can make category and template intersections only on a page or a talk page, not on page/talk in combination. I could try to build an option to collapse the talk namespace into the page namespace, but most of the stuff uses the internal page_id, which makes it difficult...
Magnus
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Magnus Manskemagnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
Is there a summary of what's changed?
Well, it's completely new, so check out the manual link on the page, and the original requirements, which have been met or exceeded: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMDE_contract_offers/Rewrite_CatScan
(note that, once my beta did all that was required, this contract offer was retracted)
One thing: when selecting depth, sometimes you want one category to be 0 depth, but the other category to be a different depth. Is that not possible?
It's explained on the manual page - just append "|2" to the category you want to use with a different depth (in this example, 2).
On closer examination, I don't think I can do what I'm trying to do with that tool.
I want to take a category tree of WikiProject tagged articles (containing pages tagged in the talk namespace), and compare to a category tree of articles tagged in the article space (normal, reader-facing categories). And see where the overlap or lack of overlap is. That requires some option to ignore namespaces when comparing page names, OR for the "check for template" bit to have an option to check the talk page of the articles in the category, rather than the actual pages in the category. Can this tool do that?
It can now :-)
One can now use template filters on talk pages instead of "actual" pages. Not the most generic option, but should cover many cases.
Also, I found that your example query yield a rather astonishing amount of categorized redirects (750 out of 813). Therefore, I also implemented filtering the results by redirect (no redirects/only redirects/either).
Cheers, Magnus
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:05 PM, Magnus Manskemagnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Magnus Manskemagnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
Is there a summary of what's changed?
Well, it's completely new, so check out the manual link on the page, and the original requirements, which have been met or exceeded: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMDE_contract_offers/Rewrite_CatScan
(note that, once my beta did all that was required, this contract offer was retracted)
One thing: when selecting depth, sometimes you want one category to be 0 depth, but the other category to be a different depth. Is that not possible?
It's explained on the manual page - just append "|2" to the category you want to use with a different depth (in this example, 2).
On closer examination, I don't think I can do what I'm trying to do with that tool.
I want to take a category tree of WikiProject tagged articles (containing pages tagged in the talk namespace), and compare to a category tree of articles tagged in the article space (normal, reader-facing categories). And see where the overlap or lack of overlap is. That requires some option to ignore namespaces when comparing page names, OR for the "check for template" bit to have an option to check the talk page of the articles in the category, rather than the actual pages in the category. Can this tool do that?
It can now :-)
One can now use template filters on talk pages instead of "actual" pages. Not the most generic option, but should cover many cases.
Also, I found that your example query yield a rather astonishing amount of categorized redirects (750 out of 813). Therefore, I also implemented filtering the results by redirect (no redirects/only redirects/either).
Wonderful! Thanks so much for doing that! :-)
The redirects? I think most of them were left behind after merging. We wanted to keep track of them, so we used redirect templates to categorise them by type. At this point, I would pull out the guideline to categorising redirects, and give a tour of WikiProject-categorised redirects, but it's late here, so I'll go and look at the list you've provided, which has several untagged articles (some of which will be merged soon, in case anyone here goes all faint at the stubbiness and cruftiness of them). At least one of them is a redirect turned back into stub...
Carcharoth
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:24 PM, Magnus Manskemagnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
<sigh>
I've been trying for 10 minutes to get it to locate articles in a category tree but missing a specific WikiProject tag, but either it's not working, or I'm not selecting the right options.
Is there a way to run this scan tool over something like "Category:J. R. R. Tolkien" or "Category:Middle-earth" (to about a depth of 6) and see which articles *lack* the template "ME-project" (a redirect to the template "WikiProject Middle-earth")?
An example is this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Sigurd_and_Gudr%C3%BAn
Not yet tagged, but none of the searches I do are detecting this.
If the category depth is a problem, use the category "Poetry by J. R. R. Tolkien".
But no matter what I do, putting a single category name in the categories box, switching the tick box from article space to talk space, and putting a template name in the "Has none of these templates" bit, nothing works.
But then it is still in beta! :-)
I also noticed this:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMDE_contract_offers/Rewrite_CatScan
Ah, maybe...
<tries something silly - fails>
<reads Magnus's next e-mail with link to manual...>
Aha! Thanks! :-)
Carcharoth
On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 12:47 PM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/8/9 WJhonson@aol.com:
About "Women" on Wikipedia, I think "famous" is probably problematic, like "list of short women", is too much based on a judgement call. And a list of all women on wikipedia would be too enormous. However I would think no one would object to something like Women by Nationality and then have a sub-cat for each nation. That you'd just have to all up everyone in that cat.
The problem being discussed in this thread would be solved by the feature (much-desired by Commons) of turning categories into tags - so that e.g. [[Category:Left-handed dead Jewish lesbian presidents of the United States]] could become a query combining a pile of tags, rather than a ridiculously specific sub-sub-category as we have now.
The nice thing is that going from the tiny sub-sub-cats to a query on tags can be done gradually without a lot of disruption.
At the moment a test version of this feature worked like a dream in PostgreSQL, but failed miserably in MySQL, 'cos MySQL is shit. Unfortunately, it's also what Wikimedia runs on. People are working on workarounds at various rates.
So all the biographies of women could be tagged "woman"? That would work, but only if the "woman" tag wasn't applied to other things as well. Maybe you would have to have "woman" + "biography"? Even then, it might not be exact. And then you would have "adult", "boy", "girl", "child", "male", "female".
Tags and categories are different. Ideally, you would have both, or a clear of idea of what would be "primary" tags (what we call categories) and what are descriptive tags.
Carcharoth
2009/8/9 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
Tags and categories are different. Ideally, you would have both, or a clear of idea of what would be "primary" tags (what we call categories) and what are descriptive tags.
Oh yeah. But in practice, most of our ridiculously specific sub-sub-cats are pretty much someone trying to construct the results of a tag query by hand. However, the point is that any change can be gradual and worked out on the ground.
- d.
2009/8/9 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
So all the biographies of women could be tagged "woman"? That would work, but only if the "woman" tag wasn't applied to other things as well. Maybe you would have to have "woman" + "biography"? Even then, it might not be exact. And then you would have "adult", "boy", "girl", "child", "male", "female".
Tags and categories are different. Ideally, you would have both, or a clear of idea of what would be "primary" tags (what we call categories) and what are descriptive tags.
This is similar to what de.wp use, I believe:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tuchman
[[Kategorie:Literatur (20. Jahrhundert)]] [[Kategorie:Literatur (Englisch)]] [[Kategorie:Autor]] [[Kategorie:Pulitzer-Preisträger]] [[Kategorie:Journalist]] [[Kategorie:Person im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg]] [[Kategorie:US-Amerikaner]] [[Kategorie:Geboren 1912]] [[Kategorie:Gestorben 1989]] [[Kategorie:Frau]]
Note that in English, we'd consider most of these very high-level categories, and indeed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tuchman
[[Category:1912 births]] [[Category:1989 deaths]] [[Category:American Jews]] [[Category:American military writers]] [[Category:Historians of the United States]] [[Category:German-American Jews]] [[Category:Jewish American historians]] [[Category:Morgenthau family|Barbara Tuchman]] [[Category:Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction winners]] [[Category:Radcliffe College alumni]] [[Category:World War I historians]]
Almost all of those are *much* more specific categories - you wouldn't get a "Historians of the United States" or "American military writers" category in German, and you wouldn't get "Authors" or "Women" in English.
Though, that said, it's very interesting to note that they each reflect entirely different aspects. In German, being a writer is emphasised. In English, the writing is dealt with more by subject matter (...military writers / ...historians), and the Jewish background is emphasised as much if not more than the nationality. A German reader finds out about the Spanish Civil War; an English reader finds out about Radcliffe.
2009/8/10 Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk:
Almost all of those are *much* more specific categories - you wouldn't get a "Historians of the United States" or "American military writers" category in German, and you wouldn't get "Authors" or "Women" in English.
To follow up - all the interwikis off our example article use the "English system" of subcategories (ie "American historians"). Does anyone know of another case which uses the "German system" of category intersection (ie "Americans" and "Historians")?
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:40 AM, Andrew Grayandrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
2009/8/9 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
So all the biographies of women could be tagged "woman"? That would work, but only if the "woman" tag wasn't applied to other things as well. Maybe you would have to have "woman" + "biography"? Even then, it might not be exact. And then you would have "adult", "boy", "girl", "child", "male", "female".
Tags and categories are different. Ideally, you would have both, or a clear of idea of what would be "primary" tags (what we call categories) and what are descriptive tags.
This is similar to what de.wp use, I believe:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tuchman
[[Kategorie:Literatur (20. Jahrhundert)]] [[Kategorie:Literatur (Englisch)]] [[Kategorie:Autor]] [[Kategorie:Pulitzer-Preisträger]] [[Kategorie:Journalist]] [[Kategorie:Person im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg]] [[Kategorie:US-Amerikaner]] [[Kategorie:Geboren 1912]] [[Kategorie:Gestorben 1989]] [[Kategorie:Frau]]
Note that in English, we'd consider most of these very high-level categories, and indeed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tuchman
[[Category:1912 births]] [[Category:1989 deaths]] [[Category:American Jews]] [[Category:American military writers]] [[Category:Historians of the United States]] [[Category:German-American Jews]] [[Category:Jewish American historians]] [[Category:Morgenthau family|Barbara Tuchman]] [[Category:Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction winners]] [[Category:Radcliffe College alumni]] [[Category:World War I historians]]
Almost all of those are *much* more specific categories - you wouldn't get a "Historians of the United States" or "American military writers" category in German, and you wouldn't get "Authors" or "Women" in English.
Though, that said, it's very interesting to note that they each reflect entirely different aspects. In German, being a writer is emphasised. In English, the writing is dealt with more by subject matter (...military writers / ...historians), and the Jewish background is emphasised as much if not more than the nationality. A German reader finds out about the Spanish Civil War; an English reader finds out about Radcliffe.
Very interesting. Particularly that the German Wikipedia uses "Woman" as a category. It looks like my idea isn't so crazy after all.
Carcharoth
Andrew Gray wrote:
2009/8/9 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
So all the biographies of women could be tagged "woman"? That would work, but only if the "woman" tag wasn't applied to other things as well. Maybe you would have to have "woman" + "biography"? Even then, it might not be exact. And then you would have "adult", "boy", "girl", "child", "male", "female".
Tags and categories are different. Ideally, you would have both, or a clear of idea of what would be "primary" tags (what we call categories) and what are descriptive tags.
This is similar to what de.wp use, I believe:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tuchman
[[Kategorie:Literatur (20. Jahrhundert)]] [[Kategorie:Literatur (Englisch)]] [[Kategorie:Autor]] [[Kategorie:Pulitzer-Preisträger]] [[Kategorie:Journalist]] [[Kategorie:Person im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg]] [[Kategorie:US-Amerikaner]] [[Kategorie:Geboren 1912]] [[Kategorie:Gestorben 1989]] [[Kategorie:Frau]]
Note that in English, we'd consider most of these very high-level categories, and indeed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tuchman
[[Category:1912 births]] [[Category:1989 deaths]] [[Category:American Jews]] [[Category:American military writers]] [[Category:Historians of the United States]] [[Category:German-American Jews]] [[Category:Jewish American historians]] [[Category:Morgenthau family|Barbara Tuchman]] [[Category:Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction winners]] [[Category:Radcliffe College alumni]] [[Category:World War I historians]]
Almost all of those are *much* more specific categories - you wouldn't get a "Historians of the United States" or "American military writers" category in German, and you wouldn't get "Authors" or "Women" in English.
Though, that said, it's very interesting to note that they each reflect entirely different aspects. In German, being a writer is emphasised. In English, the writing is dealt with more by subject matter (...military writers / ...historians), and the Jewish background is emphasised as much if not more than the nationality. A German reader finds out about the Spanish Civil War; an English reader finds out about Radcliffe.
Having had a conversation with a German Wikipedian who clearly thinks our way of doing it is broken, I'm interested in the arguments on the other side. In zoology, for example, following the Linnean classification in the category system just makes good sense: the experts have sorted through the various attributes of (say) a fish species for us, and come up with answers that make sense for classifying articles as well as species. In my own field of mathematics, good subcategorisation will be a great help to those who want to read around a subject, and I'm not very struck with [[de:K-Theorie]] as categorised by
[[Kategorie:Algebra]] [[Kategorie:Topologie]]
when [[en:K-theory]] is categorised as
[[Category:Algebra]] [[Category:Algebraic topology]] [[Category:K-theory|*]]
and [[Category:K-theory]] has over 20 specialised articles. Presumably one hopes to find those flopping around under the German system in algebra and topology categories. But the first example I found where there was an interwiki was [[de:Calkin-Algebra]] which lies in
[[Kategorie:Funktionalanalysis]] [[Kategorie:Mathematischer Raum]].
Believe me on this: it looks like you'd have to search a big chunk of mathematical articles just to find those K-theory articles. Not so good. (Even if you could get "algebraic topology" by intersecting "algebra" and "topology", which is a big stretch because "topological algebra" is not at all the same thing. Confusion of method and subject matter.)
More comprehensibly (perhaps) [[Category:Puritanism]] was bugging me, as a fairly unverifiable concept in numerous cases. So I created 15 or more subcategories in the hope of having verifiable historical information the predominant factor in 17th century English religious history. I'd like to think I wasn't wasting my time on that.
Charles
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 1:42 PM, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
<snip>
Nice example there of where en-wiki's classification systems are better.
Some people would, of course, create a K-theory navbox template.
Does de-wiki have those navboxes?
More comprehensibly (perhaps) [[Category:Puritanism]] was bugging me, as a fairly unverifiable concept in numerous cases. So I created 15 or more subcategories in the hope of having verifiable historical information the predominant factor in 17th century English religious history. I'd like to think I wasn't wasting my time on that.
It can be worrying to create lots of subcategories and then have people who have different views on categorisation come along and propose to tear down the structure. The most annoying thing is being unable to point to what a particular area of the category tree looked like before you spent a few days overhauling it. People only really see the end result, not the work done to produce that result.
A while back, I overhauled this category:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Arctic
I was most pleased with this category:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Arctic_research
Mainly because I hadn't realised we had so many articles on Arctic research.
Other ones I felt were interesting creations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Industry_in_the_Arctic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Military_in_the_Arctic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Transportation_in_the_Arctic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Environment_of_the_Arctic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:History_of_the_Arctic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Culture_of_the_Arctic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Protected_areas_of_the_Arctic
Admittedly, this one might have been a step too far:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Arctic_in_fiction
But people have been adding to it, so there is demand there.
A similarly offbeat category is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Arctic_challenges
One bugbear of mine is how terminology articles get mixed up with specific place and event articles, so I created this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Arctic_geography_terminology
A different perspective on Arctic exploration is possible here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Arctic_exploration_vessels
This all led to a portal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Arctic
An excellent protal, in my view (though not created by me, I hasten to add).
There was even a WikiProject started, which may hopefully gather steam again at some point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Arctic
I'm particularly pleased that someone has taken on the task of tackling this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arctic_expeditions
But to get back to categories, there was, at some point fairly soon after that big overhaul of the Arctic category, a discussion on how precise "Arctic" needed to be.
The discussion is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2008_Au...
At one point, there seemed to be serious consideration given to deleting all the newly created categories because it was unclear what "Arctic" meant.
"there [are several definitions to what constitutes the arctic, which in itself is a ground for deleting this category" [...] "there is Category:Arctic with a host of subcats so the problem (if any) is widespread"
Some countering views were:
"The Arctic Circle demarcates a very real physical phenomenon, and as such is not, in fact, an arbitrary line. (Remember the "Land of the midnight sun", etc.?) The fact that they're all categorized according to their countries doesn't address the fact of their extreme northern latitudes. So I think it's quite useful to have a catalog of all the settlements in this unique region." [...] "I'll give the Arctic a good talking too and tell it to stop crossing national boundries."
I made the rather pointed comment: "It would be good if those skilled in categorisation could help out with constructive comments on how to organise Category:Arctic. A centralised discussion would be preferable to having numerous categories put up for deletion in separate debates."
Then someone suggested a solution that led to this template being used on the categories:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:The_Arctic
I would hope that the reason the categories were saved was because they were useful. But I fear it was only because the template satisfied those who wanted precision in category names and classification. And the rather obsessive need to subcategorise everything by country, even in a category that clearly is intended to be a trans-national, regional one, is something I still don't understand.
The response to the queries I left at WikiProjects was varied, from nothing, to brief, to some very useful suggestions (I've only given three examples below):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Arthropods/Archive3#...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Lepidoptera/Archive3...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Plants/Archive25#Cat...
But the response to queries about a polar map was good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:GeoGroupTemplate/Archive_1#Polar_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Polar_map~
Unfortunately, the Antarctica map seems to have broken, and it seems the template never got further than the design stage. I hope someone chases that up at some point.
Carcharoth
Carcharoth wrote:
Tags and categories are different. Ideally, you would have both, or a clear of idea of what would be "primary" tags (what we call categories) and what are descriptive tags.
I asked about flickr tags years ago, but never understood the replies I got, see:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-January/021346.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-January/021348.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-January/021352.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-January/021374.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-January/021350.html
Sam Wantman and Rick Block came up with [[Wikipedia:Category intersection]], which might be of interest.