[WikiEN-l] A first encounter with Categories

[Bryan Derksen]

At 02:52 PM 6/6/2004 +0300, Viajero wrote:
>Obviously this page huge can't be used for looking up existing categories, 
>if only because it would place a tremendous burden on the servers.

Including categories in the search engine would be nice, assuming the 
search engine was enabled. :) For now, I've been mostly just going to 
articles which IMO are likely to have similar categories to the ones I'm 
looking for and hoping that they've been categorized already. Or going to 
one of the "root" categories and trying to follow the hierarchy down to the 
specific ones I'm interested in.

>* Boston Bruins players
>
>What can possibly be the use of such narrow categories with only a handful 
>of entries? Shouldn't we be aiming for broad categories (ie, albums, tv 
>stations, awards, airports, museums, cuisines, atheletes)?

Broad categories exist as well. These small, highly-specific categories fit 
under them as subcategories, which allows them to be grouped in very 
flexible ways. For example, the "Boston Bruins players" category could fall 
under the "Boston Bruins" category, which could fall under the "American 
football teams" category, which could fall under the "American football" 
category, so that if one wanted to grab a list of "all American 
football-related articles" one could recursively include the subcategories 
of "American football" and all those players' articles would be there. But 
"Boston Bruins" could also fall under the category "Boston", so those 
players would show up if one grabbed a list of "all Boston-related 
articles". They can also fall under the category "Team sports players", 
which could fall under the category "Sports players", which could fall 
under the category "Athletes". So a list of all athletes on Wikipedia would 
include the Boston Bruins players as well. (note: Wikipedia seems to be 
down right now, so I'm just making these details up hypothetically)

The alternative would be to give each of the Boston Bruins players the 
categories "American football", "Boston", and "Athletes", which would get 
extremely messy and require much fancier queries if, say, you wanted a list 
of articles about American football teams without including articles about 
the particular players.