On 8/24/06, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
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.
I have to believe that if an idea is genuinely good, there are enough sensible people who will eventually realise it and work towards implementing it.
- Majorly update the help/guideline pages about categories
As if that helps. Either I get reverted or they get ignored. Probably both.
Hence getting support first. I agree that most guidelines are generally ignored, hence the third step, which is a bit more 'in your face'.
- 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.
That could happen, but I'd like to think it wouldn't.
Problem is, they ARE behaving as they should. Or at least, they are behaving like those who work on them think they should.
I don't know, I've pointed out a few local weirdnesses in categories to people and they've generally been fairly receptive. It *seems* logical at first that Category:John Lennon is a subcategory of Category:The Beatles. But not when you consider that John Lennon ends up being a subsubcategory of Category:English rock bands.
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.
I interpret it differently. I think categorising stuff well is more difficult than editing articles. Generally, categories are structured relatively badly, and used relatively badly - not through ill will, but just lack of understanding. OTOH, it actually doesn't take that long to totally clean up a category. Maybe 2 hours to evaluate and recategorise 100 articles. I've only done it a couple of times though, and I'm still working out what the issues are. And I've not had anyone tell me to stop, or undo my changes.
Categories may be the sewer of Wikipedia, but would you like to live in a society with no sewers?
Steve