List articles have been with Wikipedia since the first year. Categories were introduced in 2004, and many thought they were to replace lists, but both forms have continued to exist side by side. Today list articles often contain tables with basic data about each item (birth years of authors, length of rivers, etc.) even before each item has its own article. A typical example would be [[List of rivers of Argentina]] on the English Wikipedia.
Each category has a page of its own, where supercategories can be added as well as short introductions. Sometimes that is a link to the "main article" for the category, which is precisely that list for [[Category:Rivers of Argentina]].
In a current discussion on the village pump of the Swedish Wikipedia it was suggested that the contents of list articles could be placed in the category pages, thus combining the two mechanisms. This strikes me as an obvious innovation, and I'm surprised that I haven't observed this anywhere on the Wikipedias I visit (and I had active accounts on 30 languages before SUL).
Has this combination of lists and categories been tried anywhere? Has any language of Wikipedia decided on a policy for or against such a combination? What experience exists about advantages and drawbacks?
2008/6/9 Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se:
In a current discussion on the village pump of the Swedish Wikipedia it was suggested that the contents of list articles could be placed in the category pages, thus combining the two mechanisms. This strikes me as an obvious innovation, and I'm surprised that I haven't observed this anywhere on the Wikipedias I visit (and I had active accounts on 30 languages before SUL).
It's not a very bad idea, but i tend to agree with the policy of the English Wikipedia on the matter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories%2C_lists%2C_and_navigation...
Those pages basically say that both categories and lists have their place in Wikipedia and explain why.
I can also add a couple of my own points to it:
1. A good list is a list which is well-maintained by an expert on the subject - but that could be said about any article.
2. In the Hebrew Wikipedia there are no defined policies about lists and their encyclopedicity* is decided by a notability discussion on a case-per-case basis. Some category pages in he.wiki have a list of links to articles that should be in the category, but weren't written yet, as a form of a "todo list" and i've never seen anyone proposing to delete such lists.
-- * The word "encyclopedicity" doesn't appear in Merriam-Webster Dictionary, but if you google it, you'll find it - guess on which site...
2008/6/9 Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@gmail.com:
It's not a very bad idea, but i tend to agree with the policy of the English Wikipedia on the matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories%2C_lists%2C_and_navigation...
Yeah. A list is good if being in a given order and annotated is a noteworthy benefit to the reader.
- d.
On 6/9/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Yeah. A list is good if being in a given order and annotated is a noteworthy benefit to the reader.
And more importantly, listing items for which no article exists (yet).
—C.W.
2008/6/10 Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com:
On 6/9/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Yeah. A list is good if being in a given order and annotated is a noteworthy benefit to the reader.
And more importantly, listing items for which no article exists (yet).
Third benefit - being able to have two entries for subtly distinct topics which we otherwise cover on a single page.
On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 4:22 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Has this combination of lists and categories been tried anywhere? Has any language of Wikipedia decided on a policy for or against such a combination? What experience exists about advantages and drawbacks?
People say lists are good because you can annotate them. What would be nice would be the ability to annotate categories. Instead of only being able to set the sort order, you could add some text to the article that appeared on the category page itself using, for example, [[category:people|Wikimedia board member|{{defaultsort}}]].
Angela
2008/6/10 Angela beesley@gmail.com:
On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 4:22 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Has this combination of lists and categories been tried anywhere? Has any language of Wikipedia decided on a policy for or against such a combination? What experience exists about advantages and drawbacks?
People say lists are good because you can annotate them. What would be nice would be the ability to annotate categories. Instead of only being able to set the sort order, you could add some text to the article that appeared on the category page itself using, for example, [[category:people|Wikimedia board member|{{defaultsort}}]].
Well, since this is turning into a brain storming of ideas for categorization improvements, let me plug in an idea i brought up recently in en.wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Categorization#Semantic_categori...
I think that it would be very useful and simple to implement, but it's a little hard to explain, so questions are welcome.
Injecting a quick hack I just made:
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/catnap.php?category=History_of_Washington
This will take all articles in "History of Washington" (max:1000 articles), get the /other/ categories these articles are in, and group them accordingly. A single article can show up under multiple headings. Headings with less than 5 articles are not shown.
We'll be right back at the category intersection problem again for large categories, but for small ones, it works quite well.
Magnus
Angela wrote:
On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 4:22 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Has this combination of lists and categories been tried anywhere? Has any language of Wikipedia decided on a policy for or against such a combination? What experience exists about advantages and drawbacks?
People say lists are good because you can annotate them. What would be nice would be the ability to annotate categories. Instead of only being able to set the sort order, you could add some text to the article that appeared on the category page itself using, for example, [[category:people|Wikimedia board member|{{defaultsort}}]].
Angela
How is this different from fixing something that is not broken?
Wouldn't it be more useful to hammer home the (astonishing!) concept that lists are not evil?
Yours;
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org