Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2006 01:47:59 +0200 From: "Steve Bennett" stevage@gmail.com
On 8/10/06, Bill Clark wclarkxoom@gmail.com wrote:
One side argues that these two categories are inherently problematic, and that a list would be more appropriate because it allows for annotation of entires and referencing of sources.
The other side insists that a list is not acceptible and that a category is required, for reasons that don't seem particularly clear to me but which they feel strongly about.
There's a similar end result problem with a totally different cause at Commons. It's easy to tag images with a category. It's easier to link to a list. End result: half of the images for some topic are in a category with that name, half are on a list.
The easiest solution to me would be to use the text space of a category as the list. You would end up with every entry listed twice: once by some arbitrary sort order (eg, year), and once alphabetically. In the list part at the top, you can put your annotations. The category listing at the bottom basically serves to check that the list part is up to date and that there aren't any stray additions.
This process should not result in the elimination of lists in favour of categories. In many cases both should exist in parallel. (The relevant category tag can always easily be put on the list page.) The two represent entirely different and complementary approaches to information organization. While a list begins with a box and tries to put items into it, a category begins with an item and tries to find the box in which it belongs.
Other than closed lists like "Months of the year" which are essentially complete, and thus have minimal utility, many lists provide us with a dynamic presentation of things that still need to be done. If this results in a large degree of overlap with the contents of a category it's no big deal. The underlying premise that we should be eliminating lists is far from being broadly supported.
Ec
On 8/12/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
While a list begins with a box and tries to put items into it, a category begins with an item and tries to find the box in which it belongs.
That's true for the *current* category scheme, but it doesn't have to be true. It would hardly be impossible for categories to be editable from the category page as well as from the pages of their contents. It would make some things a lot easier, too. It's just not something that's probably going to happen in the immediate future. If/when it does happen, combined with bug 1775, lists will finally become obsolete.
On 8/12/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Other than closed lists like "Months of the year" which are essentially complete, and thus have minimal utility, many lists provide us with a dynamic presentation of things that still need to be done. If this results in a large degree of overlap with the contents of a category it's no big deal. The underlying premise that we should be eliminating lists is far from being broadly supported.
Lists are good. I'm not sure if I explained my idea clearly enough. I'm suggesting that instead of having a "list of X" on one page, and [[Category:X]] on another page, you simply put the "list of X" text up the top of the [[CategoryX]] page. That way, you gain the benefit of being able to painlessly add items to the "listory" (by the normal [[Category:X]] link), but you can also manually add new items, and reorganise existing items by editing the listory text.
It's fairly clear to me that the right solution would be a way of extending that [[Category:X]] link as follows: * Allow more information about the link. A meta-article category like "requests for photos" would be much more helpful if you could add arbitrary-length text like [[Category:Requests for photos:It should show the front of the building, including the famous statue]] when you put the link on some article talk page. Also useful for including footnotes justifying the page's inclusion in the category... * Allow entries in the category from pages other than the included page itself - basically, to allow red links. No idea what syntax would make sense... * Allowing greater control over layout on the category page. Consider all the lists we currently have, and whether those formats could be automatically generated somehow. What are the common threads? Presenting lists in tables, breaking lists up into groups, presenting several similar but discete categories on a single page...
I don't know if there are lists that simply could never work well as categories, but by making categories more powerful, we could certainly have less in that "category"...
Steve
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org