Jakob (jakob.voss(a)s1999.tu-chemnitz.de) [040620 06:28]: 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.

Philip Newton <Philip.Newton(a)gmx.net> writes: I wish all these category changes wouldn't clutter my watch list. No, it is not an option to ignore all edits marked as "minor".

Ray Saintonge wrote: I think you are wrong here, but I wish I was more certain of my case. I'm not a librarian. I'm just fond of observing this German-American cultural clash from some distance (from Sweden).

In the field of digital libraries, there is a subculture that likes to discuss "thesauri and ontologies", especially bordering on the "semantic web" subculture. It seems to me that most people in the thesauri and ontologies subculture are from Germany and have some kind of German library science background. I'm talking about stuff like http://www.ecdl2003.org/ecdl.tutorials.html#tutorial4 and http://www.jcdl2004.org/tutorials.htm#t2a

U.S. libraries have the Dewey Decimal system for classification and other countries have other systems. These systems are colored by the time and country where they were created. So far you are right. But it seems to me that perhaps German library science scholars have gone deeper into making more of a science of this part of library science. Instead of learning, using and teaching the system they have, German library scientists discuss how best to design such category systems. I've heard them dismiss Yahoo's and Dmoz' category trees as naive creations of people who don't know the basics of library science.

I think this is what is happening on wikide-l and I'm glad that we have library scientists there. Problematisieren -- the German word for making a problem out of something, to see problems (worthy of a deeper discussion) where others don't -- is the first step of a scientific approach.

I only speak Swedish, English and German, and this reduces my perspectives. Perhaps Chinese, Russian or French library scientists have totally different approaches that I should take into account.

I checked those links and am not any further ahead. I think that I can understand how thesauri might be relevant; however, I'm puzzled by how they have imported a term from metaphysics to serve their purpose.

Jakob wrote: I generally appreciate your comments, but I would never go so far as to consider this initiative harmful. The confusion and struggle that you are experiencing on the german Wikipedia is being faced by all the projects. Each is likely to find its own way of dealing with the issue, and the solutions are likely to show considerable variation. That's fine and very wiki. Some will undoubtedly be discarded at a later stage, as a part of a normal evolutionary process. We need to avoid being overly critical of those who experiment with other possibilities. I also believe that effective categorization depends on having a properly functioning internal search function. Hopefully, the day will come when our developpers will be able to get past the constant stresses on the system, and find something that does not depend on Google. :-) Agreed. To a significant extent, yes. Perhaps it's too easy. Anybody can propose any new category, including misspelled ones. Doing it without creating chaos is a different thing. It's especially difficult for people who specialize in a particular area of knowledge. To categorize effectively at its top level requires an ability to grasp the "big picture" of the Wikipedia. Mostly yes. Building categories is a top-down activity. Categorizing articles is a bottom-up activity. The challenge lies in establishing an interface between these two activities. Whatever the mission of categories it is a subordinate mission motivated by a desire to make the information in the projects more accessible. Categories have no meaning in an information vacuum.. I would answer your questions by saying, "All of the above, and more." Library science has indeed invented numerous schemes. Any such scheme designed for general application is as good as its competitors. Each developped independently to address the priorities of the originating library. Any of them may thus be validly criticized for its nationalist tendencies. Nevertheless, choosing one of them to serve as a starting point need not be a nationalist act. That choice is more likely to be driven by the availability of detailed data, and the willingness of some individual(s) to do the work of adapting that system to serve wiki purposes. The muddling and the re-invention of the wheel implicit in most people's approach to categorization was completely forseeable. I say this without finding fault. It was just one of those miseries that had to be gone through; system convergence comes later. Let's just keep away from automated system until we know what we want. A premature application of automation will only support the muddling. I agree with what you seem to be saying but I would not put it in terms of NPOV. "Wiki is not paper," is a far more useful principle. A traditional librarian may want to classify a single copy of a book on German libraries, and must decide whether that book should be shelved with books about Germany or books about libraries. We do not have that restriction. I don't arrive at the same conclusion about stopping the use of categories. The techniques that you mention are all good and effective, and they should obviously continue to be used. Categories are a way of providing a comprehensive overview. It is easy to see at an appropriate place on an article just how that article has been categorized, or indeed '''if''' it has been categorized. A list system has its uses, but needs to be manually maintained. It is not evident on the face of the article that it has been properly listed. A non-contributing reader may not be aware of the list's existence, or of the purpose of "What links here." Even a contributor is not going to be inclined to check every article to see if it has been properly listed, but without checking he has no way of knowing. This brings me back to my earlier point about categorization of articles being a bottom-up procedure. No. the categories are meaningless in isolation. Your premise here is the most important thing that you say. No professional librarian would tolerate an author who goes around insisting that his books be classified in a particular way. The authors, the editors and the classifiers all have their own roles on the wiki. All are working toward the goal that you specify, but not in complete isolation. Ec _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l