On 8/20/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech(a)gmail.com> wrote: 20k isn't that large.. we have quite a few with a lot more than that...

On 21/08/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech(a)gmail.com> wrote: Is that the one with an article for each faux pas of a well-known US political figure in? Rob Church

Gregory Maxwell wrote: Thanks for the responses. So this is not a technical problem then. I just wonder what's the benefit of having such huge categories... I thought categories were meant as a tool for editors to iterate over the articles contained in them. I can't imagine that a human would ever iterate over a set of 20K pages (at least not without using specialized tools like AWB [1] or bots). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AWB

On 8/21/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: I've been thinking for some weeks or more now that a good feature to improve the usefulness of large categories would be "Random article in this category". I would be excellent for maintainence where nobody is going to iterate through the whole lot but does like to try to keep order etc. Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail) -- http://linguaphile.sf.net

On 21/08/06, Andrew Dunbar <hippytrail(a)gmail.com> wrote: Someone tell me why the bollocking hell I never implemented that? I'm pretty sure I set out to do so at least once in the past. ** adds it to the big list(tm) ** Rob Church

On 21/08/06, Tim Starling <t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote: That would be it. I couldn't find an effective method which Domas would agree with. I don't bother planning things any more. Having four months' worth of notes turn useless is not a fun experience. More details? Enumerate them when, and save which results? Rob Church

Tim Starling wrote: I'm not sure I understand why you're coming up with a new scheme when there exists already a scheme for "Random Article". "Random Article" works by having a page_random column in the pages table which just contains a random number. In my mind, therefore, the obvious solution is to add a cl_random column to the categorylinks table. Then you select a random article from a category in the same way you select a random article from the entire site: $sql = "SELECT page_id,page_title FROM $categorylinks, $page $use_index WHERE page_namespace=$namespace AND page_is_redirect=0 AND cl_random>$randstr AND cl_to=$category AND page_id=cl_from ORDER BY cl_random"; $sql = $db->limitResult($sql, 1, 0); $res = $db->query( $sql, $fname ); The index, of course, would be on (cl_to, cl_random). Timwi

Rob Church wrote: WTF? What sort of argument is that? o.O But why do I care -- it's not like /I/ want that feature :-p

On 8/21/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: Surprised that you didn't name this one, since it is one of the more useful human oriented ones (and a primary application for the living people cat): e) Produce a filtered recent changes feed (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&t…)

Steve Bennett schrieb: I have. It's in the current code, turned off. It's a filter to mass-sift through articles fast. The only implemented use (also turned off) is to filter Recent Changes to show only articles in a category *and its subcategories*. I have asked to turn it on for testing some time ago, but was more or less ignored (as usual;-). It could be tested on one of the smaller wikis to check what impact it would have on en or de. Magnus

Steve Bennett schrieb: IIRC it remembers which categories were already checked, and doesn't cycle forever ;-) Also, it starts with the categories a given list of articles are in, then goes *down* through the tree, towards the parent/root (or was the "up"? I keep forgetting), and checks if it finds a given category. Well, saying "show me recent changes in biology and subcategories" is definitely something I'd enjoy. Magnus

On 8/21/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske(a)web.de> wrote: Yeah. It just depends a lot on the kind of category. You probably wouldn't want *all* its subcats, there might be thousands of articles? Maybe you just want one level of subcats? On the other hand, clear-cut subcats like "Musicians by country" would definitely be interesting. Steve

On 8/22/06, Timwi <timwi(a)gmx.net> wrote: Heh, I'm apparently not "most editors". I know I keep harping on, but if we don't define what the relationship "subcategory" means, how do we know that cycles are meaningless? In particular, how would you know where to break a cycle? In some of our fuzzier areas, the subcategory relationships are so vague and arbitrary that there doesn't seem any major harm in following the chain and ending up back where you started. Steve

On 8/22/06, Charlie Reams <calr3(a)cam.ac.uk> wrote: They're obviously not easy to find since we have no built in features to do that, and every time one becomes known, it gets fixed :) Maybe Magnus's tool can help us out? I don't think we have any permanent, accepted ones, if that's what you're asking...they just happen from time to time when enough sufficiently dubious category links get made... Steve

On 8/23/06, Neil Harris <neil(a)tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote: Good explanation! One major complication not to forget is that our categories are at the *article* level, not at the *topic* or *concept* level. Often one article = one topic, but not always: for example, [[Beamish and Crawford]] is about both a brewery and a beer. [[Controlled Impact Demonstration]] covers the topics of an air safety program, a type of jet fuel, and a specific event. If anyone has some schemas or diagrams or whatever that could attempt to make sense of this, I'd love to see them. Clearly a strict hierarchy as the only classificational structure is inappropriate. However, we can also do better than unstructured tagging. What's a good compromise? How can we get the benefits of a hierarchy where it works, and the flexibility of tagging when it doesn't? Steve

On 8/23/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't think that's a problem. *Categories* are still at a concept level, after all, and even if they aren't, hierarchy would still work as expected (just there wouldn't be many available strict supercategories). [[Beamish and Crawford]] would be in both [[Category:Breweries]] and [[Category:Beers]]. Arguably that breaks down the idea of strict super-/subsets, but there's no reason to apply that to articles as a whole if it would make sense to apply it to only part of an article that deals with multiple topics. On 8/23/06, Neil Harris <neil(a)tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote: We don't even need [[located-in::]] for the main encyclopedia (leaving aside the mythical Wikidata, which is a good idea but still in the indefinite future). We just need three types of relationships: related-to, superset-of, subset-of. =Category:Humans= :''The main article for this category is [[Human]].'' ==Subcategories== All of the following are {{PAGENAME}}. * People by city * People by company * People by country of residence * People by nationality * People by occupation * People by political orientation * People by race or ethnicity * People by religion * People by status . . . ==Supercategories== All {{PAGENAME}} are each of the following. * Apes ==Related categories== * Lists of people ==Articles about {{PAGENAME}}== There are no articles about {{PAGENAME}} that are not also about a [[#Subcategories|subcategory]] of {{PAGENAME}}. ==Articles related to {{PAGENAME}}== * Human * Person * People

2006/8/24, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com>om>: Well, that's your opinion, and mine, but I already have given up arguing that. It's just not doable. The last time I argued against it on the Dutch Wikipedia (it was about Category:Upper Silezia being in Category:Provinces of Poland), there were three reactions: * Would anyone expect that they [=the pages in Category:Upper Silezia] would all be Polish provinces, because they are under "province in Poland"? I don't think so. * That's a fully normal category. (...) A principle that dozens of users have no problems with and apply automatically. Here and on other wikis. * Of course [to the person of the second reaction] If you have an idea about how to improve it, I'd like to hear it. For now, on Wikipedia we are a tiny minority, so it doesn't matter if we're right or wrong, we won't be heard. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

On 24/08/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't know if it's quite what we're looking for, but we could inspect the category browser feature (for efficiency and load etc.) and perhaps switch it on...? Rob Church

2006/8/24, Andre Engels <andreengels(a)gmail.com>om>: I got admonished on the Dutch Wikipedia because I did just complain about the category system, but did not say *what* should be improved. Problem is, the whole 'tree' has more dead wood than useful content. So I looked for 10 random categories, and judged about half of them to have major mistakes. Here a similar attempt on the English Wikipedia: 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? 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 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. Subcategory of both Cruisers of Japan and Cruisers of the Imperial Japanese Navy which have the same content but different locations in the category tree. Category:British academics: Is this useful? Why is this a subcategory of Education and Educators? 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 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? Category:TRS-80 Color Computer games: Well, nothing *major* wrong with this one Category:Haywood County, Tennessee: The type of case we are discussing. Only parent category: Tennessee counties Category:Canadian football stubs: Why o why.... 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. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

2006/8/24, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com>om>: I haven't denied that. Why that? This is another case: It is a category for classes, containing a subcategory for instances. Just my gut feeling - what's the use of this category? Would anyone think "Hey, this is a fictional Jeet Kune Do practitioner, I would want more of those". Still, I agree that after all the category is good, because you *would* want to have them in Category:Jeet Kune Do practioners, but when getting to that category from a real person, you don't want to bump into the fictional characters. So, in the end, I'm happy with this one. I disagree with that. Strongly. A category is to find similar subjects, and that is best done by having a certain size of categories. Split them up further, and you only give more work to those trying to look something up. Going with your principle would leave only categories with 1 page and categories with 2 categories - everything else can be split. The goal of categorization is to make navigation easier, it is not to categorize as much as possible. Well, it's the thing we discussed before. Or at least the thing I thought we were discussing before. It's a subcategory of tennessee counties, but the articles in it are not about Tennessee counties, but about cities. I don't see why you vehemently oppose putting "Jesus" under 'People executed for heresy" yet consider putting "Haywood County, Tennessee" in "Tennessee counties" 'good working order'. To me it's twice the same kind of thing. We are here to make the encyclopedia, not to make a classification scheme of everything. It would, in my opinion, be so much more useful to have (for example) one category about "1860s in Mexico" than to have to go through 11 categories to find those. Again my question is: What is the use of categories? To me it is, getting similar pages together. And that is done not by splitting up further and further until you have all 1- and 2-page categories, but by bringing them together to a manageable size. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

2006/8/24, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com>om>: I haven't seen another use from you where dividing up one category in numerous smaller ones is a gain. I have come up with a very logical use where it is a loss. I'm not saying that categories are *only* for finding similar pages, but it's still one of the main uses. You haven't come up with any other major uses yet, yet apparently you see them, because you seem to support greatly diminishing their use for my usage. You must have reasons for that. Tell them. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

2006/8/24, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com>om>: No, then you assume that everything that goes into a subcategory also belongs to the main category. Categorisation is not strict set theory, and bundles similar notions. A category:Germany is thus a subcategory of Category:Country, because it is a country. You may think it's logical that being in a subcategory means that there some kind of connection with the main category, and I may think so, but others don't. And when they don't think that something is illogical, they don't think their own actions that lead to such a situation are undesirable. It does. At least in the way I want to clean it up. That is, move stuff from too-small subcategories to the main category. You have to apply for deletion of the subcategory, get an objection to that, and nothing happens. That's pretty slow I say - 2 weeks to NOT get what you want. I could go and do some categories, but at best it's a mere small improvement where elsewhere there's double as much worsening. More likely I will simply get reverted. If I'm unlucky I'm getting reverted AND branded a vandal. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

2006/8/24, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com>om>: It wouldn't solve anything. The category "British rockbands" would have "Subcategories of this category should be British rockbands" and category "Beatles" would have "subcategories of this category should be closely related to the Beatles" - or in my example, countries would say ''Subcategories of this category should be countries" and Germany would say "Subcategories of this category should be categories with German topics" Because a category, to me, is a way to find related pages. And that is easiest with a certain size, say between 10 and 40 pages in the category. If there is a nice category with 15 subjects, I don't want to have to stroll through itself and all its 7 subcategories and sub-subcategories to find them all. And that's not an example that took me long to find. Well, that's one thing. Another would be putting [[Germany]] in [[Category:Countries]] and taking [[Category:Germany]] out of it. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

2006/8/24, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com>om>: Yes, that's what YOU would have thought, and what I would have thought. But someone who wants to put Category:Beatles in Category:British rockbands is going to think differently. And act in that way. And we can say "you should not put categories about rock bands in here", but that's just the same argument that we previously had about [[Category:The Beatles]]. There's nothing won by putting such a text on the category page, because someone who is of the opinion that [[Category:The Beatles]] should be in, is just going to put a text there so that it can go in, and someone who is of the opinion that it should not be in, is going to put a text there so that it cannot go in. Only difference is the place where you get the edit war. Yes, but also realistic. Someone is not going to change their mind just because they have to write it down somewhere else. Well, I want solutions that work now, not solutions that would work if the code were changed as well as the policies. That's your opinion, and mine. Not that of those who have a say about the category structure on the Dutch Wikipedia. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

2006/8/24, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com>om>: Let's just say that I wouldn't hate Wikipedia this much if I wouldn't love it this much. I've been with Wikipedia for over 5 years now, and I'm proud to have been part of it. But that also means that I'm getting much too worked-up each time things don't go as I think they should go. And that's not good - I have broken for quite some money over petty, useless fights about Wikipedia the last few days (I deformed an unused cd rack bent my curtain track beyond repair while discussing with you). I know I should just stop, but I can't. It's too addictive. I don't know. Showing pages in subcategories with the category (preferably such that it can be switched off but is switched on by default) would be a good idea, but I'm afraid it should have been finished not yesterday but one year ago to really work. The possibility to have different 'aspects' and get an intersection would be nice too, but probably would take very little time to become as much of a mess as are categories now. Imagine that we would want to have the full Wikipedia on one wiki page, and then allow only section editing on the lowest level. That's the kind of mess categories have become. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

Steve Bennett wrote: Take one more step back and ask: What do our categories mean? In the paper "Analyzing and Visualizing the Semantic Coverage of Wikipedia and Its Authors", http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.IR/0512085 from December 2005, the authors make an analysis of the English Wikipedia's categories, but the largest categories (table 2, page 10) are hardly "semantic" subject headings, but a technical tool for identifying various quality problems: 1. Disambiguation 40,062 articles 2. 1911_Britannica 10,450 3. Film_stubs 4,867 4. Musician_stubs 4,575 5. American_actors 4,551 6. American_people_stubs 4,401 7. Film_actors 4,023 8. Musical_group_stubs 3,873 9. Album_stubs 3,859 10. Television_actors 3,207 11. Politician_stubs 3,021 12. Articles_to_be_merged 2,899 13. British_people_stubs 2,706 14. American_politician_stubs 2,694 15. Television_stubs 2,540 16. American_actor_stubs 2,492 17. Cleanup_from_October_2005 2,466 18. Incomplete_lists 2,362 19. Football_(soccer)_biography_stubs 2,298 20. Medicine_stubs 2,297 Today's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Mostlinkedcategories isn't much different. Perhaps it does make some sense to study which users contributed most to the category "cleanup from October 2005", but rather for finding dilettantes than for finding experts on a subject. When the authors write that "category assignments were introduced in May 2004 and 78,977 unique categories have come into existence since then" I cannot help but laugh and remember Larry Sanger's initial reaction when this was discussed in January 2002, http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-January/018685.html (Here, "May 2004" refers to new functionality in MediaWiki 1.3.) Today "categories" is a technical tool that can be used for many purposes. Organizing and structuring the contents of Wikipedia according to subject headings is only one of them. Compare this to another technical tool, "templates", which can be used for cleanup messages, for navigation, for infoboxes, for userboxes, for external link syntax, etc. The pages describing these features in the Help: and Wikipedia: namespaces are confusing these issues all the time. I think we should aim to separate the issues 1. what do you want to accomplish, and 2. what technical tools are available at this time. For example, if I want to create an infobox, I could use raw HTML tables, wikitext table syntax, templates with numeric parameters or templates with named parameters. I could also use a robot to put these infoboxes in a number of articles. Next year, another version of MediaWiki will provide more tools, but my purpose is still to create an infobox. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

On 8/24/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: It's simple. Look up at my earlier subcategories of humans: ==Subcategories== All of the following are {{PAGENAME}}. * People by city * People by company * People by country of residence . . . The key line is "All of the following are {{PAGENAME}}.". Well, let's rephrase that slightly: "All articles in each of the following categories are {{PAGENAME}}." Given the line "All articles in each of the following categories are British rock bands", does Category:The Beatles fit? Now, one problem here is that "The Beatles" actually means "Beatles-related things" here, just as "Jesus" means "Jesus-related things". This is something that will need to be clarified. To that end, notice that I've introduced multiple constructions *hard-coded into the category page* that assume that the category name is in the plural--no more lazy ambiguous shortcuts like "Category:Jesus". If "article X and Y are in category Z" is not synonymous to "article X and Y are Z", then the category is wrong. Of course, people could change the interface back, but with some encouragement I don't think they would. You just have to make a change that will allow them to have "related to" built into the system, and combined with easy recategorizing/category renaming, I think they'll see the light.

On 8/24/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj(a)gmail.com> wrote: That's because you haven't quite gotten what I'm getting at yet. The category wouldn't be called "John Lennon", because nothing is a John Lennon (other than, presumably, John Lennon, who would be rather lonely). Rather, under "things related to Beatles", you would have "things related to John Lennon" or something. Inelegant, I know, but I think you see where I'm going with this? The main problem is the terminology. I mean, it works logically, but I don't think people will go for saying "No, things-related-to-the-Beatles isn't a supercategory of things-related-to-John-Lennon, things-related-to-the-Beatles is only related to things-related-to-John-Lennon!" But that's the fault of the English language. I leave it to the wordsmiths to improve upon my terminology. :P That's Wikidata. We're still waiting. I was putting forth an interim solution, adding only one new type of category-inclusion, so that you don't have to explicitly state all sorts of things like transitivity and deal with arbitrary numbers of relations and so forth. To be honest, it probably wouldn't be that much of a time-saver, so there's probably no point in an interim solution. We just need to get someone to stick to one of the various Wikidata-ish projects and finish it. Hopefully this Semantic MediaWiki business that was just committed as an extension will end up in a state where the WMF is willing to use it.

OK, but how's that any different than what we have now, except with more words involved, and more potential for confusion? I.e. you can still say Imagine (song) is a thing related to John Lennon, which is a thing related to The Beatles. The relationship between the Beatles and Imagine (song) is somewhat tenuous, I think. Also it leads to things like saying "Jesus is related somehow to Waves", to use the original loop example. I'm just not sure that it tells you anything useful. So you're saying that supercategories should not imply any transitive relationship whatsoever? But isn't that worse than the current situation, which at least tries for some vague ill-defined type of relationship? Granted, it seems to fail, but at least it tries. Ah, ok. I've just quickly read through the Wikidata page on meta, and while it sounds interesting, it's trying to do much more than just store a relationship type between categories ... possibly too much more. [[Sailing Yacht]] -- is a --> [[sailing ship]] -- is a --> [[Category:Ship types]] ^ | is a | [[The Hunt for Red October]] -- is about a --> [[submarine]] ... or is it a trick question? All the best, Nick.

2006/8/23, Neil Harris <neil(a)tonal.clara.co.uk>uk>: Doing a search of cycles, I found that there must be thousands if not more of them on the English Wikipedia. Yours differ somewhat from the average by being short. I chose a category more or less at random (it was [[Category:Waves]]). It had 999 supercategories, and was part of 6 cycles (counting only elementary cycles): Waves -> Sound -> Music -> Music events -> Music competitions -> Eurovision Song Contest -> Eurovision host cities -> Rome -> History of Rome -> Ancient Rome -> Ancient Roman religion -> Ancient Roman Christianity -> Patristics -> Heresy -> Heretics -> People executed for heresy -> Jesus -> Doctrines and teachings of Jesus -> Nonviolence -> Peace -> Social justice -> Community organizing -> Protests -> History of social movements -> Critical theory -> Cultural studies -> Museology -> Anthropology -> Linguistics -> Proper nouns -> Organizations -> Educational organizations -> Schools -> School subjects -> Biology -> Tree of life -> Eukaryotes -> Animals -> Chordates -> Tetrapods -> Synapsids -> Therapsids -> Theriodonts -> Mammals -> Primates -> Apes -> Humans -> Technology -> Systems -> Dynamical systems -> Waves Waves -> Sound -> Music -> Music events -> Music competitions -> Eurovision Song Contest -> Eurovision host cities -> Rome -> History of Rome -> Ancient Rome -> Ancient Roman religion -> Ancient Roman Christianity -> Patristics -> Heresy -> Heretics -> People executed for heresy -> Jesus -> Doctrines and teachings of Jesus -> Nonviolence -> Peace -> Social justice -> Community organizing -> Protests -> History of social movements -> Critical theory -> Cultural studies -> Museology -> Anthropology -> Linguistics -> Proper nouns -> Organizations -> Educational organizations -> Schools -> School subjects -> Biology -> Tree of life -> Eukaryotes -> Animals -> Chordates -> Tetrapods -> Synapsids -> Therapsids -> Theriodonts -> Mammals -> Primates -> Apes -> Humans -> Technology -> Applied sciences -> Engineering -> Mechanics -> Dynamical systems -> Waves Waves -> Sound -> Music -> Music events -> Music competitions -> Eurovision Song Contest -> Eurovision host cities -> Rome -> History of Rome -> Ancient Rome -> Ancient Roman religion -> Ancient Roman Christianity -> Patristics -> Heresy -> Heretics -> People executed for heresy -> Jesus -> Doctrines and teachings of Jesus -> Nonviolence -> Peace -> Social justice -> Community organizing -> Protests -> History of social movements -> Critical theory -> Cultural studies -> Museology -> Anthropology -> Linguistics -> Proper nouns -> Organizations -> Educational organizations -> Schools -> School subjects -> Biology -> Tree of life -> Eukaryotes -> Animals -> Chordates -> Tetrapods -> Synapsids -> Therapsids -> Theriodonts -> Mammals -> Primates -> Apes -> Humans -> Technology -> Applied sciences -> Education -> Education by subject -> Physics education -> Introductory physics -> Waves Waves -> Sound -> Music -> Music events -> Music competitions -> Eurovision Song Contest -> Eurovision host cities -> Rome -> History of Rome -> Ancient Rome -> Ancient Roman religion -> Ancient Roman Christianity -> Patristics -> Heresy -> Heretics -> People executed for heresy -> Jesus -> Doctrines and teachings of Jesus -> Nonviolence -> Peace -> Social justice -> Community organizing -> Protests -> History of social movements -> Critical theory -> Cultural studies -> Museology -> Anthropology -> Linguistics -> Proper nouns -> Organizations -> Educational organizations -> Schools -> School subjects -> Biology -> Tree of life -> Eukaryotes -> Animals -> Chordates -> Tetrapods -> Synapsids -> Therapsids -> Theriodonts -> Mammals -> Primates -> Apes -> Humans -> Technology -> Applied sciences -> Education -> Academia -> Academic disciplines -> Mathematics -> Dynamical systems -> Waves Waves -> Sound -> Music -> Music events -> Music competitions -> Eurovision Song Contest -> Eurovision host cities -> Rome -> History of Rome -> Ancient Rome -> Ancient Roman religion -> Ancient Roman Christianity -> Patristics -> Heresy -> Heretics -> People executed for heresy -> Jesus -> Doctrines and teachings of Jesus -> Nonviolence -> Peace -> Social justice -> Community organizing -> Protests -> History of social movements -> Critical theory -> Cultural studies -> Museology -> Anthropology -> Linguistics -> Proper nouns -> Organizations -> Educational organizations -> Schools -> School subjects -> Biology -> Tree of life -> Eukaryotes -> Animals -> Chordates -> Tetrapods -> Synapsids -> Therapsids -> Theriodonts -> Mammals -> Primates -> Apes -> Humans -> Technology -> Applied sciences -> Education -> Academia -> Academic disciplines -> Mathematics -> Differential equations -> Waves Waves -> Sound -> Music -> Music events -> Music competitions -> Eurovision Song Contest -> Eurovision host cities -> Rome -> History of Rome -> Ancient Rome -> Ancient Roman religion -> Ancient Roman Christianity -> Patristics -> Heresy -> Heretics -> People executed for heresy -> Jesus -> Doctrines and teachings of Jesus -> Nonviolence -> Peace -> Social justice -> Community organizing -> Protests -> History of social movements -> Critical theory -> Cultural studies -> Museology -> Anthropology -> Linguistics -> Proper nouns -> Organizations -> Educational organizations -> Schools -> School subjects -> Biology -> Tree of life -> Eukaryotes -> Animals -> Chordates -> Tetrapods -> Synapsids -> Therapsids -> Theriodonts -> Mammals -> Primates -> Apes -> Humans -> Technology -> Applied sciences -> Education -> Academia -> Academic disciplines -> Mathematics -> Equations -> Differential equations -> Waves Interestingly, checking out your examples, I found none of them (I checked London, Russia and Universe, with 1060, 1013 and 1001 supercategories) is currently part of a loop. For Jesus on the other hand, there are 39 different cycles, which however all start with: Jesus -> Doctrines and teachings of Jesus -> Nonviolence -> Peace -> Social justice -> Community organizing -> Protests -> History of social movements -> Critical theory -> Cultural studies -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

Steve Bennett wrote: It seems rather pointless to me to label 20k pages needing citation. But that's probably not a technical question. If I do a random walk on en Wikipedia, almost every page seems to have some tag needing something ("This page is in need of <insert your pet peeve here>"). This reminds me of all these "under construction" pages in the earlier days of the web.

On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 10:35:23AM +0200, Ligulem wrote: How many editors does en have? Well, perhaps, but those sites weren't being crawled hourly (and minutely :-), but people a) equipped and b) inclined to fix things. I'd ask if anyone has any statistics on how often those tags are affixed and removed, but... Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.

On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 02:24:19PM +0100, Rob Church wrote: Well, that could be a failure in [[Be Bold]], or it could just be laziness. I wonder if there's any way to decide which... Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.

On 21/08/06, Steve Bennett &lt;stevage(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I'm talking about the little stub that looks 50/50, or the single spelling error that causes them to roll out the {{cleanup}} tag. Those are the best kind! Rob Church

On 8/21/06, Steve Bennett &lt;stevage(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Maybe if there were a "go to a random article in need of cleanup" feature then more people would do just that... Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail) -- http://linguaphile.sf.net

On 8/22/06, Simetrical &lt;Simetrical+wikitech(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: In fact maybe they already do this and nobody actually does notice or care (-: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail) -- http://linguaphile.sf.net

On 8/22/06, Jay R. Ashworth &lt;jra(a)baylink.com&gt; wrote: So pick a random member off the first page instead. Or from the second sometimes. Or the tenth. You don't need a built-in system to do that, just pick one. There are probably only going to be like ten people who actually do this on a regular basis, even on enwiki, however much encouragement is provided, and it's not like it usually takes that long to do cleanup, so conflicts are unlikely even if you just pick the first article off the first page.

On 8/21/06, Rob Church &lt;robchur(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I don't think it's so simple. I almost always have a Wiktionary open while I'm working at the reception desk and it's so easy to hit random and tag imperfect articles with a couple of fix-it categories that doesn's take your brain away from your job like getting in and editing the article would. Later when you don't have your mind split in two it's easy to go back through stuff you found earlier than look and fix at the same time. Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail) -- http://linguaphile.sf.net

There is a very important difference between the two, though. The "under construction" pages are an excuse for a lack of content. They were supposed to show to the visitor that someone's working on it and that it'll be ready "Soon™". The Wikipedia tags, however, are an invitation to participate, i.e. a request to someone else. They are a productivity tool, and they are meant to help improve the content, not the visitor frequency. Timwi