[WikiEN-l] Restructuring, renaming, creating and removing Wikiprojects

[Charles Matthews]

Simonides of Ceos wrote:

>Charles, if that is not the way they have worked so far, my suggestion - of
using Wikiprojects to smooth out categories and make people interested in a
specific topic work together - is what I would like implemented from now on,
at least in the Wikiprojects I am interested in.

I think using a WikiProject page to get discussion on more systematic use of
categories is a good idea.

>Adding Categories at random makes things immensely confusing, as I have
discovered in the past couple of days - I can't even create an index of
writers without running into scattered lists that overlap in some places and
are very incomplete in others, and are not the same as identically labelled
lists elsewhere (ex. List of French authors does not correspond to the list
of French writers on the French personalities page.) A minimal
standardisation - ex. the formatting of an article into Bio, Works,
Bibliography, External Links, Categories - makes perfect sense, and I don't
believe that is too prescriptive - it's not much of an imposition on actual
content.

I suppose I have the luxury of working mostly in an area - mathematics -
where the system of listing was worked out before categories arrived. (Also,
I added most of the lists myself, so I don't have many problems with that
system!).

I do see that jumping straight to categories before having a good list
system is quite tough, and potentially confusing.  It seems to me like doing
two things at once; I have compiled many lists, and the job is mainly to
_find_ everything, before thinking deeply about subclassifying.  The
technique for that that works is to explore all backlinks.  This takes time,
and those who want a quick solution underestimate quite how much material
there is in Wikipedia, often in a neglected state.

But as for inconsistent systems: I think on any wiki site one has to get
used to the idea of multiple, parallel systems.  There is no
centralisation - that's a fact of life here.  Intellectually I'm very
sympathetic to the organising/centralising tendency, actually.  It really is
better to think of it all as 'infrastructure', though - no reason to worry
about bus versus train questions.

Charles