On 8/24/06, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
Category:Cities in Tokyo - is both in "Geography of Tokyo" and "Tokyo". Why? Category:Romanian military aircraft 1930-1939 - there are 3 articles in this category. There's also 3 categories to put it in. Need I say more?
We lack good model categories, I think. For me, a category like "Tokyo" should only contain two things: Subcategories (Geography of Tokyo, Tokyo culture, People born in Tokyo...), and articles waiting to be subcategorised. It's totally consistent with the wiki principle that articles can be dumped in the simplest category, and then moved later by an editor with more "local" knowledge.
To answer your "why?" question: Because subcategories don't work. The princple that "If X is a subcat of Y, then Z should not be in both X and Y" is totally bogus and unworkable - at the moment.
Category:Spanish translators - Why is this divided by nationality instead of language, which I would find much more logical. And I don't consider translators non-fiction writers either
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Translators - what more could you ask for, we have [[Translators by nationality]], [[Translators by destination language]] *and* [[Translators by source language]]. In the subcategories, not only do we have [[Category:Translators from Spanish]] but we even have [[Spanish-English translators]]. Perfect! Sure, these categories aren't well populated, but the structure is 10 out of 10.
Category:Sendai class cruisers - A category with only 2 pages is functioning more to confuse than to enlighten. A subcategory of "cruiser classes" although it is rather than has cruiser classes.
There is general blurring of the distinction between classes of things and things themselves. See [[Category:Elephants]] for an example. The solution is probably to branch these categories into "Famous X's", "Classes of X" etc. For a category with only 5-6 members I'm not fussed if it contains both articles on general classes of things and specific instances of those things, but for bigger categories we should be more precise.
Category:British academics: Is this useful? Why is this a subcategory of Education and Educators?
A good example of our common "non-strict subset" problem. Lots of academics are "educators". But not all.
Category:Fictional Jeet Kune Do practitioners: I hate this type of category, but alas, putting it directly in the parent categories would be even worse
Why? It seems to be in the right place, a subcat of both Fictional martial artists and Jeet Kune Do practitioners. Should probably be a subcat of some "Computer game characters" or something too.
Category:Indoor ice hockey venues in Sweden: What is gained by having indoor and outdoor ice hockey venues in separate categories, except that there are more categories with more possibilities for getting lost?
I disagree - everything is to be gained by splitting categories whenever they can be unambiguously and precisely split. OTOH, since Category:Outdoor ice hockey venues in Sweden doesn't exist, the point is moot.
Category:Haywood County, Tennessee: The type of case we are discussing. Only parent category: Tennessee counties
Seems to be in good working order?
Category:Canadian football stubs: Why o why....
Yep, these "metacategories" (ie, categories containing meta information about our articles) are a bit ugly, but they don't seem to cause a great deal of harm. And one day it will be trivial to tag them all and do something special with them. They're all subcats of Category:Stub categories after all. And currently they're somewhat useful.
Category:1862 in Mexico: That's two articles. And no doubt many similar categories. There's even a category Underpopulated (Year) in Mexico categories.... Categorizing for the sake of categorizing. Or worse.
What's wrong with "Categorizing for the sake of categorizing"? And what's wrong with underpopulated categories? It's just like a stub - awaiting further development.
Steve