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@de.wikipedia.org)
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.
On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 07:22:39 +1000, David Gerard wrote:
Jakob (jakob.voss@s1999.tu-chemnitz.de) [040620 06:28]:
- 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.
But only if the article was on your watchlist anyway.
If, say, you're interested in [[Category:Goth]], then your watchlist won't notify you when a new article (that you weren't previously watching) is added to that category, even if you're watching [[Category:Goth]].
This is something I've wished for as well, and I hoped watching the category would provide for that, but no.
It would be a good way to be notified of articles in the topics I'm interested in, for example.
Cheers, Philip
Philip Newton Philip.Newton@gmx.net writes:
On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 07:22:39 +1000, David Gerard wrote:
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.
But only if the article was on your watchlist anyway.
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".
On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 08:38:23 +0200, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
Philip Newton Philip.Newton@gmx.net writes:
On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 07:22:39 +1000, David Gerard wrote:
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.
But only if the article was on your watchlist anyway.
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".
Would it be an option to unwatch the category?
I mean, nobody forces you to watch a category so that you could receive notice of articles being added to it, if this feature should become available in the first place.
(Or were you referring to the edits where someone adds a category to an article you were watching? In that case, yes, I also find it mildly annoying, though I believe the volume of those will die down once things settle down somewhat.)
Cheers, Philip
Philip Newton Philip.Newton@gmx.net writes:
(Or were you referring to the edits where someone adds a category to an article you were watching?
Yes, that's it.
In that case, yes, I also find it mildly annoying, though I believe the volume of those will die down once things settle down somewhat.)
Hopefully - but these Germans a pretty ambitious ;)
Jakob wrote:
Categories considered harmful
I generally appreciate your comments, but I would never go so far as to consider this initiative 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.
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. :-)
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 3. There is a clear common mission - to create an encyclopedia (+NPOV)
Agreed.
As far as I also can see the category-function contradicts all of them:
To a significant extent, yes.
- 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.
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.
- It's not controllable.
You cannot watch a category to get noticed on new articles or when somebody removes an article from the category.
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.
- 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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
No. the categories are meaningless in isolation.
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!
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
Ray Saintonge wrote:
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.
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.
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
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.
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).
I readily admit that I am not up to date on modern trends in German library science :-)
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
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.
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.
Their criticisms of Yahoo and Dmoz are quite likely valid. Hard core scientists will dispute that there can be any science in Library science. Still we need a technology more than we need a science. Will the efforts of the German scientists lead to a user friendly system. Users too easily reject any kind of coded system.
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.
How scientific does our approach need to be?
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.
And how has this issue been developping in Swedish? As I said before, each wiki is likely to find its own solution to the problem. Compatibility may need to came at a later stage.
Ec
On Jun 20, 2004, at 1:52 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote: 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
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_%28computer_science%29
-Bop
Ray Saintonge wrote:
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.
I think the term "ontology" entered the scene from artificial intelligence (AI) research, which soaked up some hype from Tim Berners-Lee's "semantic web" ideas. There is a pretty good article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_%28computer_science%29 People from information retrieval (IR) or library and information science (LIS) tend to prefer "thesaurus". In some cases people make a difference between the two, but I think they are mostly synonyms or overlapping. WordNet (www.globalwordnet.org and http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/) is probably the biggest real-world open-source example.
It is possible to divide the world into people who believe in data structures (those who build WordNet, Dmoz, other thesauri, and the semantic web), and those who believe in free text (those who build Wikipedia and the old non-semantic web). Wikipedia's categories is a border-crossing. Some of the people who could/should contribute might have been turned off by Wikipedia's previous category-free approach.
Sorry for being so vague. I took computer science at a university where information retrieval wasn't even taught.
Lars Aronsson wrote:
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
I'm not sure this is purely a national issue: there's quite a few US researchers working on "sematic web" stuff, and it's one of the trendy areas of research these days. Nobody seriously defends the Dewey Decimal system as a modern classification system---its defenders mostly cite reasons of continuity and compatibility with existing categorizations (such as physical library holdings), and say that these outweigh any deficiencies, as it is, in their viewpoint, suboptimal but still more than good enough.
(Of course, there's lots of viewpoints falling to any side of that one.)
I do think ad-hoc categorization is going to end up mostly useless. Either it's going to end up hierarchical, but with a rather idiosyncratic and arbitrary hierarchy, or it's going to be very inclusive and overlapping, with most articles fitting under a large number of categories. Nearly all medical articles can go under [[Category:Alternative medicine]] as well, for example; [[The Bible]] can go under about a million categories relating to Christian sects, or even non-Christian religions, sects, groups, cults, and all manner of other organizations that have something to say about the Bible; etc.
-Mark
1. The list Wikipedia, other encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc. as we know it, have the following in common: they are a list of usually single words (entry words, items, index words, etc.) associated with longer texts (articles) for which connection (whether explicit or implicit) the whole collection is sought. The way the number of items in the list is growing is either by inclusion of a new item that an author knows enough, or by the inclusion of a new word as a stub that a curious reader is not knowledgeable enough and wants to know more of. Each entry word first is found somewhere out there (in the context) and is then decontextualised, lemmatised, etc.) to be included in that list. If there are homonyms, the original context of each occurence is partially reconstructed and marked by disambiguation.
Context, however, should be considered to introduce additional relevant points (sometimes the originator for example), and if you go on without exactly specifying the relations that a given context reflects, you should have a lot more contexts shown in a structured fasion than normally found in dictionaries and/or in encyclopedias (compare: categories, senses, semantic web, etc.).
Given that wikipedia and its sister projects are word-centered devices you can hardly go beyond basic grammar terms and the alphabet used a) to bring an entry word to a common form (noun, single word), and b) to sort them according to a single ("senseless") criterion that keeps resulting in an alphabetic index only to rely on in searching.
2. The text/article
Since on learning about the world and/or words all of us progress from known items toward unknown items by establishing various new connections and sorting the input individually, it may be desirable to include a ring of pointers that a) take you from scratch (trivia, dictionary entry) to the latest advances connected to an entry word, b) allow you to check for covering the complete process of acquiring knowledge in a given subject in succession. And context therefore should not be dispersed aroud the free-floating text. In other words, knowledge associated with an item should be graded and presented accordingly. Using a hypertext structure is fine, but not using other text processing tools such as concordance (KWIC/KWOC) programs to recreate and/or remodel textual information is not quite comprehensible with so many computers at hand.
apogr
----- Original Message ----- From: "Ray Saintonge" saintonge@telus.net To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Sent: Saturday, June 19, 2004 11:45 PM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Categories considered harmful
Jakob wrote:
Categories considered harmful
I generally appreciate your comments, but I would never go so far as to consider this initiative 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.
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. :-)
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 3. There is a clear common mission - to create an encyclopedia (+NPOV)
Agreed.
As far as I also can see the category-function contradicts all of them:
To a significant extent, yes.
- 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.
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.
- It's not controllable.
You cannot watch a category to get noticed on new articles or when somebody removes an article from the category.
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.
- 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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
No. the categories are meaningless in isolation.
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!
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
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