[WikiEN-l] CATEGORIES!!!!!!

[Slim Virgin]

On 4/9/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I'm angry right now, so I very probably should not post to the List until I
> cool off; but my emotions are overriding my good senses at the moment - so
> here goes.
>
> It concerns what has been a pet peeve of mine almost from the beginning of
> my work with the encyclopedia: CATEGORIES!
>
> I do a fair amount of research in my work, and one of the things that
> attracted me to WP in the first place was the Category feature. If I were
> doing research on, say, Accidental Deaths, or Suicides, or Cancer Deaths (to
> name just three) I could select on these Categories and, bingo, I would have
> an entire wealth of documented cases of persons with these characteristics.
> NOW, the Category Police have so diluted this process with trillions of
> subcategories, e.g., Persons who died accidentally on a train while
> traveling from Newark to Tampa ;-) - that the whole Category system has
> become worthless to serious researchers. This, in itself, would not be a
> problem, but to add the greatest injury of all, each person included in this
> subcategory has been removed from the main one. So to see all cases of
> Accidental deaths in the encyclopedia I have to go to each subcategory,
> print the lists and collate them myself. Agghh!
>
> I have sworn off Categories. I have taken the pledge. From now on I won't
> even look at the bottom of an Article.
>
> There, I feel better now :-) Thanks for your ear.
>
Marc, I couldn't agree more but I've given up arguing about it.
Apparently, the same person is not allowed to appear in the main
category if they're also in a subcategory. So people's names are
removed from "Accidental deaths" and placed instead in the subcat
"deaths while falling from a ladder at lunchtime in Solihull." It has
been explained a thousand times that these micro categories, plus the
no-repeated-names rule, wipe out the point of having categories in the
first place, but there is a small but determined group in charge of
categories, and there's no reasoning with them.

Sarah