2006/8/24, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com:
The basic process would be:
- Convince a few clueful people that there is *a better way*
Well, good luck. I'm not good at convincing people, and besides, those who really matter (those who work much on categorisation) will undoubtedly say "this is how we do it everywhere" and refuse to even consider your proposal. Also, they are the ones who told me it was 'fully logical and done by everyone' what is done now.
- Majorly update the help/guideline pages about categories
As if that helps. Either I get reverted or they get ignored. Probably both.
- Somehow modify the interface for categories so it's clearer what
should and should not be added. This is the tricky bit.
And how would you do that? People will either use the system for their own nonsense, or they will not look at it at all. Or even worse, they will go and revert whatever you did through the localisation. We can make nice texts, but people will have other opinions and go and change the texts in the MediaWiki namespace.
Actually, it would be really cool if category pages could draw a local map of related categories, like maybe two nodes up and one node down or something, to give people a visual impression of what the category is doing, and whether it's behaving as it should.
Problem is, they ARE behaving as they should. Or at least, they are behaving like those who work on them think they should.
Also, since there tend to be less categories in each category than there are articles, it might make sense to display the "sister categories" for each category to again reinforce to the editor whether the category is in the right supercategory or not. Working on categories at the moment is very much like operating through a keyhole
- you can't see *anything* of the surrounding context.
The category system is a mess, a labyrinth. But I don't see any way to improve that any more. I have given up on them, to me they're just the sewer of Wikipedia now. Which is a shame, because they looked so great when introduced. But apparently it's typically something where the lowest common demonimator decides the level of the whole. Where there's two possibilities, both will have people in favor of them, and in the case of categories, it's the stupidest of those two who will prevail.