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:

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:

2009/8/9 Bod Notbod <bodnotbod(a)gmail.com>om>: 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 3:24 PM, Magnus Manske<magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com> wrote: 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 5:04 PM, Magnus Manske&lt;magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: <snip> <blush> Would you believe I completely missed that link to the manual? :-/ Carcharoth

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Carcharoth&lt;carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: 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 11:05 PM, Magnus Manske&lt;magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: 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 Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 12:47 PM, David Gerard&lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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 &lt;carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com&gt;om>: 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. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:40 AM, Andrew Gray&lt;andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk&gt; wrote: Very interesting. Particularly that the German Wikipedia uses "Woman" as a category. It looks like my idea isn't so crazy after all. Carcharoth

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 1:42 PM, Charles Matthews&lt;charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com&gt; 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? 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_A… 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/Archive… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Plants/Archive25#Ca… 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