On 8/24/06, Andre Engels <andreengels(a)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