[WikiEN-l] Category destruction

[K P]

On 4/29/07, John Lee <johnleemk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 4/29/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> >
> > on 4/29/07 10:38 AM, John Lee at johnleemk at gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > > I still maintain that categories are the best way to organise our
> > content,
> > > provided that we have unions and intersections. Tags simply don't
> > provide
> > > the necessary hierarchy and structure to make organising content
> simple
> > and
> > > easy; they're excellent for random browsing, but not so much for
> hunting
> > > down specific articles.
> >
> > I agree with you completely, John. It's just that the present state of
> the
> > Category system is completely out of control. The existing Policies on
> > Categorization have become more complicated than the U.S. Tax Code; and,
> > those that can be deciphered are being completely ignored. I, for one,
> am
> > not sure how much more cerebral RAM and emotional energy I want to spend
> > on
> > this.
>
>
> The status quo is patently unacceptable. The question now is, where can we
> get the expertise necessary to write the requisite code for intersections
> and unions, and further, how can we stem these increasingly complex and
> arcane policies? The latter is simple; as policy is descriptive, not
> prescriptive, use common sense when categorising, unless you feel the
> situation is too complex for your common sense to be right. The former is
> a
> more difficult problem to solve.
>
> Johnleemk



You need a librarian for this.  We're trying to do everything for free and
voluntary at Wikipedia, but categorizing things requires an overarching
scheme and Wikipedia is implemented and run to prevent just this.

I had a number of group programming assingments in school (long ago), and
one woman in the class was a reject for all groups, as she was a lousy
programmer.  I let her be in our group, figuring she couldn't harm my
programs.  Turns out she was a librarian, and when it came to writing
databases we kicked everyone else's butts.  It always seemed so easy after
she organized everything, but there is no way I have the skills to do what
she did, because she understood how categories work--and she knew that you
had to start at the top (all the programmers here are thinking, of couse,
that in those days that was what programmers were supposed to do, too), and
she knew where to place the top.

Nobody on Wikipedia or Wikimedia even knows what categories are, much less
how they work, as far as I can tell.  Set theory?  Probably no one
understands that either.

KP