I for one (despite being a cricket cabalist) agree with you on the category thing. I don't quite understand the reasoning for the cricket subcategories category. I actually intend to undertake a major review of cricket categories very soon, so I'll discuss the point then.
However, I do in general disagree that policy (or at least guideline) couldn't be bypassed when it is for the best for the encyclopdia as a whole. That should be our target, not slaveishly following guidelines for their own sake.
Sam
On 6/25/05, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Timwi wrote:
I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no say anyway.
I've recently come across a couple of examples of something like this this too, on Wikiproject Cricket. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cricket_subcategories directly contains all subcategories of Category:Cricket in it, for use by wikiproject members who want a list of categories to search when categorizing new aticles. My attempts to either replace this with a plain old list page or to move the category tags into talk pages (in accordance with the category guidelines suggesting that "meta" categories should go on talk pages) were vigorously opposed by Wikiproject members. I let the issue lie for a few months since it didn't seem in any way urgent and monitoring the category's usage over that time has been useful.
As a followup "where are things now" sort of thing, here's what happened. After I mentioned category:cricket subcategories here, it was put up for deletion by User:Thebainer. I had been hoping to wait for six months or so before putting it up for deletion again, the last time was only four months earlier. It failed the vote again, with Grutness voting keep because "they seem to be keener on using the category, so I'm swayed towards supporting a keep here." and Ngb voting keep because "This is, as previously discussed in a recent CfD for the same category, an invaluable tool for participants in the Cricket Wikiproject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Cricket. Conversion to a list is unsuitable as the list would need to be manually updated every time a new category was developed."
I still maintain that this category is in violation of Wikipedia guidelines, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization#Wikipedia_namespace states "Categories relating to the Wikipedia namespace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Project_namespace should be added only to the talk page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Talk_page of articles. For example, tags suggesting the article is needs work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:To_do, or is listed on VfD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VFD would be placed on the talk page as they are relevant to editors, not an aid to browsing in the way ordinary categories are." So in accordance with that, I went ahead and started moving the category tags over to the category_tak: pages.
I got as far as the "C"s before User:Calsicol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Calsicolcame along and reverted all the work I'd done. He said "You seem to be an American, and your page gives no indication that you have any interest in cricket. Thank you." While it is true that I have no particular interest in cricket, this strikes me as being exactly the sort of problem that this thread was talking about; it doesn't _matter_ that I have no particular interest in cricket (and although I'm not actually American, it wouldn't matter if I was either). I have an interest in making sure the category system on Wikipedia is being used in a nice and tidy manner, which gives me just as much reason to be changing this setup as someone who's a rabid cricket fan.
Anyway, I guess I'll let the issue drop again for another couple of months and come back to it. I still have the 2005 cricket season subcategory thing to work on, I expect that'll draw a lot of ire when I start actually changing things too. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l