Jakob (jakob.voss@s1999.tu-chemnitz.de) [040620 06:28]:
As far as I can tell there are three main reasons for Wikipedia's success:
- It's very easy to contribute (Wikitax, everybody can edit)
- Every edit is monitored in watchlists and list of lasts edits so we can control each other
- 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:
- It's not easy.
It's remarkably easy. I find it so anyway.
- It's not controllable.
You cannot watch a category to get noticed on new articles or when somebody removes an article from the category.
This could do with fixing. OTOH, it's becoming conventional for one's edit summary to say "[[Category:xxx]]" when you add an article to category xxx. Which of course shows up in your watchlist.
- 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).
I find it very useful to accumulate a group of articles on a subject I'm interested in (e.g. Category:Scientology and Category:Goth, which I created). A quick overview give one some idea of what's missing as well.
It also allows one to try to bring all of a category up to scratch. A lot of the articles in Category:Goth are just a bit crappy and need work. But now they're on one list, and I can feel a sense of achievement at making that category worth the effort.
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.
I think you're wrong here. Categories are emerging quite nicely. Badly-named ones are getting turned into well-named ones, even if that means editing thirty articles by hand. It's clunky at first, but the wiki process is working on this one too.
Given the reasons I strongly recommend to stop using the categories and to focus on writing and improving good articles.
As I note above, a category can help one write obviously missing articles and give an incentive to bring bad ones up to scratch.
Many categories can easily be replaced with normal links between articles.
One important presentation function I find for categories is that they can replace those bloody ugly article series boxes people are so fond of.
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.
I disagree. I've found categories useful already (goth, scientology - once each was created, others added stuff to them).
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.
Bottom-up category creation is working, in my humble opinion - because hierarchies of categories are emerging, and it's a lot easier moving a category in a hierarchy than moving all thirty-odd articles to a different category.
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!
I appreciate your frustration with the current proces, but it's early days yet. I haven't addressed everything you've said, and I do see your points, but I think they won't be a problem in the long run - because good stuff is already coming out as an emergent behaviour. Which, by the Bazaar process, will produce better stuff if it's a sound approach in the first place. Which I think it is.
- d.