[WikiEN-l] Categories (was: Hello)

[Marc Riddell]

Steve,

It is clear to me from all of the dialogue, that the issue of Categories and
their use in Wikipedia is not only controversial, but also pretty much
unresolved and unfocused. And, what could be a powerful tool within
Wikipedia has evolved into an unfocused mess. I believe it is going to take
a small group of focused, objective persons, taking an equally focused,
objective look at it, and formulate a set of firm guidelines for its use ­
starting with, of course, its very purpose.

I would like to take the discussion back to my original question: May I
include both a main category and a subcategory in the same article? I would
like to accomplish this without creating an edit war with another editor who
thinks it¹s wrong.

Marc


> From: "Steve Bennett" <stevagewp at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2006 15:19:43 +1100
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Categories (was: Hello)
> 
> On 12/13/06, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>> It is beginning to dawn on me (perhaps the sun rises later here) that there
>> is/would be a great difference between categorizing biographical articles v.
>> non-biographical ones. The biographical would require much less complex
>> layers. Any thoughts on this?
> 
> I don't think there are any simple dichotomies in this. Different
> kinds of stuff have different kinds of categorisational needs.
> 
> We have a current trend towards splitting big categories. We prefer a
> single category "Dutch authors" rather than adding two massive
> categories to an article: "Dutch people" and "Authors". However this
> approach is pretty clearly a dead-end: how many times can we split?
> What do we split on next, "Dead Dutch authors"? Good category
> intersections would really help that one...
> 
> I guess you're right in that people are just made up of attributes:
> where/when they're born/died, what field they were primarily in etc,
> all of which could be much more complex trees.
> 
> Steve
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