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

[Bryan Derksen]

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 4/11/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>> My own pet peeve along these lines is articles with no categories other
>> than various subject-specific stub categories added by subject-specific
>> stub tags. Why go to the trouble of sorting and specifying the type of
>> stub it is and not add the actual categories at the same time? Seems
>> like such a trivial extra step, we could even have a bot doing the work.
> 
> IMHO it is a mistake to criticise people for not doing work. We can
> criticise them when they do harm. But doing 10 minutes of work, and
> not the other 2 minutes...well, that's perfectly valid in the wiki
> world, imho.

I'm not really _strongly_ criticizing people for putting the stub tags
in (even though I personally consider it a strange waste of time), it
just seems to me a silly omission that doesn't actually save them any
time or effort. Sort of like if someone were to do a bunch of work
adding headers to an article but use '''bold''' text instead of
==header== text and leave it to other editors to come along and fix the
syntax.

Also, I don't know how clever the uncategorized-page-tagging bot is, but
would the existence of those stub article categories cause the article
to be overlooked even though it isn't really categorized? That could be
an actual hinderance caused by this.

> In any case, I frequently create stubs in areas I know nothing about,
> and simply don't know what the best categories are. So I might end up
> using something really generic like "Sports" or "People" or something
> and letting someone else refine it.

That's usually what I do when I come across uncategorized pages in my
random-paging. The thing I was complaining about was articles with stub
tags but not even the generic categories that could go along with them
(eg, I just came across an article with {{Newspaper-stub}} and
{{Houston-stub}} but no categories, so I threw in [[Category:Houston,
Texas]] and [[Category:Newspapers]])