I've always been big fan of lists for many reasons and I thought about this too.
I agree with Ray that one big advantage of lists is that they show red links.
Another advantage is that lists can be formatted and augmented in customized ways, ones that would take a large amount of customized programming to produce. For example, the list of opera composers can not only include uncreated articles, but it can also be hand-tailored to include information like dates of birth, nationality--or perhaps arranged in chronological order, or by nationality, etc. To me this kind of information architecture is large part of the beauty of Wikipeidia.
Many list articles are like a human-made SQL query from the database of Wikipedia that would have required a huge overhead in database fields to create automatically.
Certainly there may be lists that are rendered obsolete by categories, but in the majority of cases, I see categories as complementing lists in most cases, not replacing them.
But this will all shake out. The debate about how lists will work is really over. Whatever was said is water under the bridge Now it's a matter of the collectivity of contributions from editors actually creating categories that will determine how they are really used.
As far as lists being "out of date". Well, that's *always* been an issue with lists and will remain so. I don't see that as a problem, really. We all do our best, to keep things synchronized and up-to-date. Certainly categories will suffer that same thing too, since many newe articles will be created without appropriate category tags.
Ray Saintonge said:
Viajero wrote:
Maybe I have been out of the loop but just what is the purpose of Categories?
Just now I noticed that someone went through a bunch of pages I was watching and added the cateogry "Opera Composer" which seems entirely logical for the relevant articles, except that we have already have a page [[List of opera composers]]. Does this mean that this article is redundant? My personal instinct, which may or may not be relevant here, is not to do things in two different ways when one suffices. Will people continue to update the handmade lists now that Categories pages are available in such cases of redundancy as this? If not, they should be deleted, as outdated lists are a help to nobody.
Yes and no. To some extent the manual lists are wish lists with empty links appearing in red. The category system can't pick up list elements that don't exist. Any manual list should probably receive a category tag as well. In a closed end subject or one that is effectively closed-ended (such as the list of US presidents) there are strong arguments from deleting the list when pages exist for all its elements. The list of opera composers, however, is open-ended and should probably remain so that new names can be added, and we can know which have been done and which remain to be done.
Ec
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