2006/8/24, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com>om>:
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.
--
Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels