[WikiEN-l] A first encounter with Categories

[Stan Shebs]

Viajero wrote:

>Thanks to various responses to my earlier post on the subject, I have come to appreciate some of the possibilities of Categories, at least in theory. So, this morning I decided to categorize the forty or so articles on writers which I created or to which I made major contributions, having seen several suitable Categories show up in my Watchlist for similar articles. To start with,  I wanted to know what categories have already been created for writers and journalists. For example, I saw a category for for "Argentine writers" (the article on Borges I think). Does this mean I should also create a category for Uruguayan, Mexican, and Chilean writers (I wrote up a couple) even though such categories would have one or two entries?  However, there doesn't seem to be any comprehensive, hierarchical index of categories. [[Wikipedia:Categorization]] should serve this function, but it is woefully incomplete.
>
Having had a little outing with categories, with mixed satisfaction,
I'm more interested in going back and working on some topdown
organization. As you probably saw from some of the people fooling
with diagrams, there are a couple of different approaches. One is to
create categories for every conjunction of categories - if you have
"hotels" and "museums" and "Ohio", that means you should have "hotels
in Ohio" and "museums in Ohio" categories. The other approach is to
have an article in multiple categories and do nothing else, but then
the software currently gives you no easy way to list only the museums
in Ohio.

I personally tend to favor the second approach, because the
conjunction categories will combinatorially explode and eventually
outnumber articles. It seems more useful to add a way for the category
page to optionally group members by a second category or some such, so
you can go to the museums category and say "organize by location
categories" and have it sort and group by country/state/city.

In any case, I think category creation will settle down once there
are about as many categories as there are lists now.

Stan