Categories considered harmful
Since Version 1.3 of MediaWiki we have the nice category function. In the
german wikipedia there is a lot of confusion and struggle on how to use
categories in the right way. As a student of library science I could tell
several methods how to classify, index and sort things but none of them
seems to be applicable easily with the current implementation of categories.
As far as I can tell there are three main reasons for Wikipedia's success:
1. It's very easy to contribute (Wikitax, everybody can edit)
2. Every edit is monitored in watchlists and list of lasts edits
so we can control each other
3. There is a clear common mission - to create an encyclopedia (+NPOV)
As far as I also can see the category-function contradicts all of them:
1. It's not easy.
It's not easy to know how to do it in the right way because subject
indexing is a complex issue and it's not easy because of lacks in the
implementation (no rename, no redirects, no assignment of articles to
categories without editing every single the article pages). Editing an
article I have to guess which categories are existing, how they are
spelled and the rules what to classify into them and what not.
2. It's not controllable.
You cannot watch a category to get noticed on new articles or when
somebody removes an article from the category.
3. There is no common mission
Can anybody tell the purpose of categories? Finding articles (without
a coordinated search function?!) Browsing in topics (without a clear
overview of all categories?!) Are we trying to index articles with
subject heading, using a thesaurus, a classification or even a structure
ontology? Library science has invented several kind of schemes like that
but at the moment everybody is muddling this and that trying to invent
the already invented wheels of documentation (by the way there are also
methods of automatic indexing, clustering and classification).
And: In classification there is no NPOV because there is no "right" way
to classify the world but it depends on the special needs and questions
I want to answer with a special system of subject indexing.
Given the reasons I strongly recommend to stop using the categories and
to focus on writing and improving good articles. Many categories can easily
be replaced with normal links between articles. Adding and removing
categories do not change an article's content a bit. If you want to
keep track of all articles in some area use (Wiki)Projects, article
series, portals and learn how to use the "what links here"-function!
A good article is an article that can be found easily without categories.
Indeed classifying wikipedia articles is very interesting and will
become more important, but this should be an independent project - maybe
in a "Classifipedia" or "Categorypedia" that links to wikipedia
articles.
You know - librarians normally do not write the books they organize and
search engine experts do not write the websites they crawl, so let's focus
on what we can do the best: creating the most detailed, most understandable
and freest encyclopedia in the history of mankind!
Greetings,
Jakob Voss (aka nichtich(a)de.wikipedia.org)