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

[Matthew Brown]

On 4/9/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I believe the way categorization has been done on enwiki is with the
assumption that sooner rather than later, a feature that makes
subcategorized articles automagically appear in the supercategory as
well will be implemented.

Unfortunately, I see no momentum to do this - and furthermore, because
it doesn't work that way right now, people are already doing things
with a category tree that would make it nonsensical anyway.

One sometimes-unfortunate trait in Wikipedia is that things are done a
certain way because the people obsessive enough to do the
micro-management of things like categorization want it that way,
regardless of what the overall editor population or indeed the reader
population would actually prefer.  This is the Wikipedia-specific
version of something all too often seen in free software; most free
software works the way people who know enough to write that program
want it to work, not necessarily the way that people who just want to
use the software would like it to work.

-Matt


-Matt